Aakanksha Virkar

Dr Aakanksha Virkar Yates is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Brighton. She specialises in late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century British literature and has interests spanning literature, philosophy, music and visual culture.

Dr Virkar Yates studied at the Universities of Bombay, Cambridge and Sussex and was the recipient of a Commonwealth scholarship at Cambridge. From 2013-2015 she was a visiting research fellow at the University of Sussex and at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, London. From 2015 she has been lecturing at the University of Brighton. She is presently researching a monograph on 'Beethoven, Modernism and Freedom in British Literary Culture: 1919-1945', which explores Beethoven's influence on writers including T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Her publications include work on Eliot's poetry, music and philosophy and she was recently an invited guest for BBC Radio 3's 'Beethoven Unleashed' programme in 2020.