Alok Yadav

Alok Yadav

Alok Yadav

Associate Professor

Restoration and 18th-Century British literature; nationalism, imperialism, and literary culture; postcolonial and world literature, esp. South Asian; anthologies of African American writing

Alok Yadav teaches courses on Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial and World Literature, such as ENGH 333 (British Novel of the Eighteenth Century), Engh 330 (The Augustan Age), ENGH 331 (The Age of Sensibility), ENGH 366 (The Idea of a World Literature) and special topics courses on the African and South Asian Novel and on Empire and English Literature, as well as core courses such as ENGH 500 (Research in English), ENGH 305 (Dimensions of Writing and Literature), and ENGH 302 (Advanced Composition). He received his PhD from Cornell University, and taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago before joining the English Department at George Mason. He is the author of Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004) and of the digital project Anthologies of African American Writing (soft launch 2021), and has published essays and reviews on issues of nationalism, empire, eighteenth-century British literary culture, and fictionality in Clio, Criticism, Cultural Critique, ELH, Literature Compass, Modern Philology, Novel, and Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research

Current Research

He is currently working on a digital project on anthologies of African American literature (enumerative bibliography, documentation of covers, index of contents, and reception history), as well as on a book on Kipling's Kim and political criticism of literature, and has a chapter on "Fiction, Belief, and Postcolonial Criticism" forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief (2024).

Selected Publications

Anthologies of African American Writing. Digital project. 2021- .

"Picaresque Novel." The Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Peter Melville Logan, et al. 2 vols. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

"Literature, Fictiveness, and Postcolonial Criticism." Novel 43.1 (2010): 189-96.

Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

"Fractured Meanings: Hudibras and the Historicity of the Literary Text." ELH 62 (1995): 529-49.

"Nationalism and Contemporaneity: Political Economy of a Discourse." Cultural Critique 26 (1993-94): 191-229.

Grants and Fellowships

GMU Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence (CTFE), Faculty Learning Community (FLC) grant, 2017-18 (co-facilitator with Eric Anderson and Tamara Harvey)

Fenwick Fellowship, GMU Libraries, 2017-18

Study Leave, George Mason University, 2007-08

NEH Faculty Workshop Grant (with John Foster, Amal Amireh, Tamara Harvey, and Joel Foreman), Fall 2005-Fall 2006

Mathy Junior Faculty Fellowship, George Mason University, Spring 2000

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1992-94

Cornell Graduate Fellowship, 1988-89

Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 1986

A.D. White Fellowship, Cornell University, 1986

Commonwealth Fellowship, Great Britain, 1986 (declined)

Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Special M.A. Scholarship, 1986 (declined)

Courses Taught

ENGH 305: Dimensions of Writing and Literature

ENGH 308: Theory and Inquiry (What Is Fiction?)

ENGL 330: Augustan Age 1660-1745

ENGH 331: Age of Sensibility 1745-1800

ENGL 345: Empire and English Literature: Marlowe to Kipling

ENGL 350: The Idea of a World Literature

ENGH 431: Literature of the Enlightenment

ENGL 450: Eighteenth Century British Novel

ENGH 453: Topics in Fiction: Nobel Prize Fiction

ENGH 458: Past & Present: The Challenge of Reading Older Literary Works

ENGL 500: Research in English Studies

ENGL 635: Eighteenth-Century British

 

Education

Ph.D. in English, Cornell University, 1993

B.A. (with high distinction), University of Toronto, 1986

Recent Presentations

“Anthologies of African American Literature: The Second Life of Literary Works.” Historical Poetics Now Symposium, U of Texas, Austin, 10 Nov. 2019.

"An Online Bibliography of Anthologies of African American Writing: Literary History and Digital Scholarship: A Modest Proposal." Fenwick Fellows talk. GMU Libraries. 17 April 2019.

 

In the Media

Interviewed for Lynn Neary. “Swedish Academy to Name 2 Nobel Laureates in Literature in 2019, After Missing 2018.” All Things Considered. NPR. 9 Oct. 2019.

Interviewed for Andrew Limbong. “No Nobel in Literature This Year Following a Sexual Assault Scandal.” Morning Edition. NPR. 4 Oct. 2018