Yasmin Akhter

Before joining Royal Holloway in 2020, I studied for a BA in English Literature at Kings College London and an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College. My research is broadly concerned with how the literatures and cultures of the Victorian period reflected or responded to the yet-unfolding projects of Empires. I think about how academic research might expand or complicate what we understand to be ‘Victorian’ and how we might then change contemporary cultural notions of Victorianism. As a teacher, my work is informed by critical pedagogies and a desire to see English Literature made accessible to students of all backgrounds. My teaching interests and specialisms include global anglophone literatures, the long nineteenth century, postcolonial studies, literary forms and their connections to Empires, and literary-critical theories and methods.

My PhD thesis questions persistent assumptions of the nineteenth-century cosmopolite as a figure of universalist, anti-national liberal ideologies, and as a leisurely traveller and sampler of the world’s cultures. It argues that the central assertion of cosmopolitanism as a mode of being ‘at home in the world’ is, in fact, a spatial predicament shaped by the individual’s attachments to disparate places and socio-cultural environments. My thesis, then, turns to the autobiographical records of displaced subjects – migrants, exiles, and nomads – to revisit the ways in which this philosophical orientation to ‘the world’ appears and circulates in varying forms throughout the nineteenth-century world of empires. I explore how Emily Ruete (1844-1924), M.N. Roy (1887-1954), and Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) spatialised their displacement or, their fraught departures from ‘home’ and entrances into ‘the world’, in memoirs, diaries, and letters. In doing the work of pluralising our conceptions of what it meant to think of oneself as belonging to the world, the thesis also presents the ways in which life-writing forms operated as acts of cosmopolitan self-making. This research has also informed my latest project, which thinks about the connections between life-writing forms and empires.

BA Year 1

EN1107 Re-orienting the Novel

EN1101 Thinking As A Critic

EN1112 Introducing English Poetry 

BA Year 2

EN2212 Victorian Literature

BA Year 3

EN3127 – Orientalist Fantasies from the 18^th Century to the Present 

MA

EN5840 – Victorian Climates: Writing Empire and Environments

Research Activities

From 2023-24, I was a Graduate Co-Director of Royal Holloway’s Centre for Victorian Studies. I organised and led its annual Victorian Studies Colloquium which focused on interdisciplinary methods of expanding (or widening, diversifying, unsettling, undisciplining) Victorian Studies. From 2012-22 I was a Committee Member of the London Nineteenth Century Studies Graduate Strand and co-organised the annual PGR conference on ‘Communities, Relationships, Networks’.