Anjali Nerlekar has an academic career that spans India, Bahrain and the United States. Her research interests include multilingual Indian modernisms; modern Marathi literature; Indian English literature; Indo-Caribbean literature; world literatures; translation studies; Caribbean and postcolonial Studies; Indian print culture; Indian visual studies; archipelagic studies.
Her book, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016) is also being published in India by Speaking Tiger Publications in 2017. Through a bilingual and materialist reading of the poetry by Marathi/English poet Arun Kolatkar, the book shows how the genre of poetry emerged in Bombay in the post-60s (the sathottari period) as the instrument of radical protest and experimentation at the multiple junctures of regionalisms, new publishing spaces, national politics and transnationalisms. She has also co-edited a special double issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (“The Worlds of Bombay Poetry,” Spring 2017).
Her other publications and research include work on multilingualism and literature, Indo-Caribbean and Postcolonial literature, and comparative Indian and postcolonial modernisms.
Her ongoing project (in collaboration with Dr. Bronwen Bledsoe at Cornell University South Asia collections) is the building of an archive of multilingual post-1960 Bombay poetry at Cornell University titled “The Bombay Poets Archive.”
Her current projects include an anthology on postcolonial archives and a project on mapping the multilingual borders of modern Marathi literature.
