Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir FBA is a literary and cultural historian with interests spanning music, dance, film, the visual arts, academic discourse, and literature, and invested in examining what these forms of cultural production can tell us about global modernity.

Professor Kabir studied at the Universities of Calcutta, Oxford, and Cambridge before taking up a Prize Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge (1997-2001). After further postdoctoral fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and the Centre for History and Economics, then at King’s College, Cambridge (2001-2003), she spent ten years (2003-2013) at the School of English, University of Leeds. In 2011, she was appointed Professor of the Humanities at the School. She joined the Department of English at King’s College in April 2013.

Between 2005 and 2011, Professor Kabir was co-investigator or lead investigator in collaborative projects funded through the AHRC and ESRC’s large research programmes (Diasporas and Migrations: Religion and Society). As one of the first AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellows, she co-curated the multi-sited art exhibition ‘Kismet and Karma: South Asian Women Artists Respond to Conflict’. In 2011, she was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship to complete a monograph on the Partition of India. During 2013-18 she will lead a research project on Afro-Diasporic rhythm cultures and modernity (www.modernmoves.org.uk), funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant.