Publications

Books 

The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/obsolete-empire

The Limits of Cosmopolitanism, co-edited with Aleksandar Stevic. New York: Routledge, 2019. https://www.routledge.com/The-Limits-of-Cosmopolitanism-Globalization-and-Its-Discontents-in-Contemporary/Stevic-Tsang/p/book/9781138502048

Essays

“Negative Cosmopolitanism: The Case of V. S. Naipaul.” Twentieth-Century Literature, 66:2 (2020).

“Allegory of the Global Anglophone: Interconnectedness and Sublimity in Cloud Atlas.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 51:3 (2018).

“A Transcription of Impressions: The American Scene and the Jamesian Aesthetics of Lateness.” The Henry James Review, 35:3 (2014).

Book chapters

“Why Is the Patient English? Disidentification in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction.” The Limits of Cosmopolitanism. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Courses

• The Twentieth-Century Novel: From The Rainbow to Gravity’s Rainbow (Fall 2025)

  This course explores some of the most groundbreaking novels of the twentieth century—a century of breakneck innovation, traumatic violence, and permanent crisis. We will begin with D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), a panoramic portrait of industrialism, urbanization, and shifting sexual relations in the previous century; and conclude with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a frantic odyssey through the wreckage of World War II and the nuclear paranoia of the Cold War. In between, we will read three shorter novels that challenge, reinvent, and explode the conventions of storytelling: Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Collectively, these novels revolutionize the form and language of fiction, and teach us to read in radically new ways.

• Minor Modernism (Spring 2025)

  When we speak of modernism, we usually think of the long, complex, encyclopedic works by Proust, Joyce, Pound, and Musil. But is there a modernism of the minor, the minuscule, the minimalist? This class takes Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “minor literature” as a starting point to explore a strain of modernist writing from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century that embraces a minoritarian impulse against the heroic monumentalism of canonical modernism. What might we learn from a “minor modernism”? What implications might it have for minority politics, minor languages, and the increasing marginalization of literature? In the age of social media and AI, how might literature transform its minor, diminutive status into a radical possibility?

• Gothic Literature and Film (Spring 2024)

  Mystery, fear, haunting, evil forces, supernatural events: these are some of the defining elements of the Gothic, one of the most popular and enduring genres in Western literature. In this course, we will ask why writers from the eighteenth century onward would turn to the Gothic to explore larger social and political issues. We will begin with William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and his daughter Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Then, we will trace the transformation of Gothic conventions in nineteenth-century British and American fiction by looking at Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Herman Melville’s Pierre, and one of the most iconic novels of all time, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We will conclude with a Mexican Gothic: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. In addition, we will watch some Gothic films by Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Ingmar Bergman, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Haneke, Joanna Hogg; as well as David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks.

• Literature and History of British India (Spring 2021)

  This course explores the complex history of British rule in the Indian subcontinent. We will cover the final decades of the East India Company, the 1857 rebellion and the subsequent transfer of power to the Crown, the nationalist movements of the early 20th century, and finally the dissolution of British rule in 1947 and the partition of the subcontinent into two independent states: India and Pakistan. By examining major literary works (from both England and India) as well as a wide range of historical documents, we will investigate such topics as imperial governance, surveillance and intelligence, penal power, English education, religion, ethnic violence, Orientalism, gender and sexuality, and the politics of memory.

• Global Modernism (Fall 2021)

  The term “modernism” has traditionally referred to a canon of works produced in Europe during the interwar era, but recent scholarship has greatly expanded our understanding of modernism as a truly transnational movement, an interconnected phenomenon shaped by material, cultural, and geopolitical changes on a global scale. In this course, we will examine various approaches to global modernism: not only will we read a wide array of canonical as well as lesser-known works from across the world, but we will also explore how modernists understood themselves as global writers. How did they imagine time and space? How did they respond to such issues as immigration, exile, social reform, world war, imperialism, technology, and energy extraction? How was modernism constructed as a global discipline?