Atul V. Nair, a research scholar working under the supervision of Professor Pramod K. Nayar and Professor Anna Kurian in the Department of English, UoH, presented a paper at a conference titled “Victorian Antipathies” at the University of Stuttgart in Germany with a travel grant sanctioned by the Institution of Eminence (IoE)-UoH.
The conference was organised by Nina Engelhardt and Anja Hartl from the Universities of Stuttgart and Konstanz respectively between November 3rd and 5th, 2022, and it focused on the emotion of antipathy (as the opposite of sympathy) in the literature and culture of the Victorian Age. Atul’s paper titled “Victorian Antipathies: Reporting the 1857 Uprising in Select Indian English Periodicals” examined antipathy in the coverage of the Indian Uprising of 1857 by English periodicals published in India such as the Calcutta Review and the Bombay Quarterly Review in 1857-58. This forms a part of his doctoral project which explores the construction of ‘Indian literature’ as a category in English periodicals between 1784 and 1857. The conference provided a platform for intense discussions on Victorian literature from cultural locations as diverse as the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia.
The keynote speakers for the conference were Pamela Gilbert (University of Florida), Zachary Samalin (New York University), and Tara MacDonald (University of Idaho), with participants from across Europe, the US, Australia, and India.
Atul expressed thanks to his supervisors for their guidance, the IGM Library-UoH, as well as the IoE for sanctioning the travel grant.