Comparative Literature

Sneha Chowdhury is a sixth year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. Her dissertation titled “Poetic Entanglements: German-Hindi Translation and Global Modernism” examines German and Hindi poetry as entangled literary formations shaped by reciprocal practices of translation, aesthetic experimentation, and modernist thought in the twentieth century. Focusing on the work of the German scholar and translator Lothar Lutze and the Hindi modernist poet Satchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan (Agyeya), it analyzes poetic translations, critical essays, and correspondence to show how translation operates as a site where literary form and linguistic politics intersect. By situating these practices in relation to broader debates on linguistic hegemony and modernism, the dissertation challenges Anglocentric models of world literature and expands existing accounts of German–Indian intellectual exchange. Shifting the focus from Orientalist paradigms and nineteenth-century encounters in scholarship on Germany and India to twentieth-century Hindi modernist poetry, it offers a new account of global modernism grounded in translation as a practice of aesthetic and ideological entanglement. Her academic writing including articles and book reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming in Modern Language Notes (German Issue), German Life and Letters, German Studies Review, Critical Inquiry, De Gruyter and Comparative Literature Studies.

Education:

M.A., Comparative Literature, Brown University
M.Phil. in English, Jawaharlal Nehru University 
M.A. in English, Jawaharlal Nehru University   
B.A. Honours in English, Lady Brabourne College, University of Calcutta 

Languages:

English, German, Hindi, Bengali and French