Ayesha Ramachandran

Biography

A scholar of the literatures and cultures of early modern Europe, Ayesha Ramachandran explores the disciplinary, theoretical, and material challenges posed by globalization from the late fifteenth century to the present. Her writing focuses on the making of worlds through interdisciplinary relations between art and science, particularly, poetry, philosophy (natural and political), cartography, visual and print culture. She works primarily with the English, French, and Italian literary traditions, but her research interests extend to Portuguese, Spanish and Neo-Latin materials; more recently, she has been expanding her scholarship into Persian, Urdu, Hindi and their associated Arabic intertexts. This emphasis on worldmaking across Eurasia enables her to connect traditional methods of philology, book history, and historical phenomenology, with a commitment to decolonizing literary canons and frameworks by engaging debates in colonial and postcolonial theory, anthropology, and critical archival studies. 

Her prize-winning first book, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015; pbk 2018) charts transnational encounters and the early mechanisms of globalization from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. It places literary texts in dialogue with other materials, genres, and media, including maps, globes and atlases, scientific instruments, philosophic and scientific treatises, painting, engraving, and works of political theory. It was awarded the MLA’s Scaglione prize in Comparative Literary Studies (2017), the Milton Society of America’s Shawcross Prize for the best book chapter on Milton (2016), and the Sixteenth Century Studies Association’s Founder’s Prize for the best first book manuscript (2015).

Turning from the macrocosmic to the micro-scale, her forthcoming book, Lyric Thinking: Towards a Global Poetics crafts a transhistorical and comparative account of lyric poetry radiating from the early modern period to classical antiquity and to our contemporary moment, taking its cue from poets reading other poets across language, time, and space. It argues that the lyric’s insistence on a distinctive existential stance characterized by a first-person standpoint offers a shared philosophical ground for comparative study thereby opening up a new approach to global poetics. Drawing on insights from the ontological turn in anthropology with its emphasis on perspectivism and multiplicity, Lyric Thinking reveals the lyric as a space of intellectual porosity, a continuum of thinking-feeling, and a complex union of embodiment and reflexivity, where knowledge of the world can only be gleaned through the self. A third collaboratively written book project, Styles of Being: Early Modern Ontologies Now (in progress), brings these preoccupations together in an investigation of the links between anthropology and cross-cultural encounters in the early modern period.

Ramachandran currently serves as one of the co-editors of Spenser Studies and has also guest edited four journal special issues. She has written over thirty essays for a range of journals and edited collections and has been the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant, and a John Carter Brown Long-term Fellowship. She is a Senior Fellow of the Rare Book School’s Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.

Ramachandran’s teaching ranges across the humanities and comparative literature curriculum. At the undergraduate level, she teaches the department’s foundational course, LITR 130: Fundamentals of Comparison and offers courses in Global Shakespeare, lyric poetry and poetics, maps and the Western literary imagination, and early modern intellectual history; her courses regularly engage closely with materials in Yale’s collections, particularly the Beinecke Library. She has co-founded the Six Pretty Good Ideas program where she often co-teaches “Six Pretty Good Selves” with Marta Figlerowicz. At the graduate level, she teaches the Early Modern Studies Workshop (the required proseminar for joint degree candidates in Early Modern Studies), Theory and Practice of Material histories (the proseminar for the Graduate Certificate in Material Histories of the Human Record), and courses in early modern poetry, worldmaking, and literary theory. Her wide-ranging commitment to pedagogy has been recognized with a Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching.

Education

B.A. Smith College, 2001, magna cum laude
Ph.D. Yale, 2008

Research Interests

Early modern European literature and cultural history; lyric poetry and comparative poetics; literature and anthropology; history of science and technology (sixteenth and seventeenth century); cartography and literature; early modern empires; history of philosophy; connected histories of early modern South Asia; history of book and critical archive studies.

Selected Publications

The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

“In Shakespeare’s Aftermath: The Lyric Expansions of Kapil and Taneja” in Shakespeare Survey, guest edited by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Hannah Crawforth. Forthcoming.

 “Spatial and Scalar Multitudes: Thinking with World, Globe, and Planet” with Joseph Campana, in Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900, 62:1 (2022)

“Faerieland’s Cannibal Metaphysics: Spenser with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,” with Joe Moshenska, in Companionable Spenser, a Special Issue of Spenser Studies, Volume XXXVII (2022), guest edited by David Hillman, Joe Moshenska, and Namrata Rao, 119-44.

“The Jaguar’s Beer: Critical Approaches to Multiplicity in the Early Modern World,” with Carina Johnson, in Multiplicities: Critical Approaches to the Early Modern Global. A Special Issue of Modern Philology Volume 119.1 (2021) 1-12

“Lyric Poetics for the Global Renaissance,” in A New Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion 1550-1700, Second Edition, ed. Jyotsna Singh. (Wiley Blackwell, 2021).

 “Worldmaking and Early Modernity: Cartographic Poesis in Europe and South Asia,” Cambridge History of World Literature, ed. Debjani Ganguly. (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

 “Allegories of Influence: Spenser, Chaucer and Italian Romance” in Lines of Beauty: History, Aesthetics & Renaissance Literature. A Special Issue of MLN: Comparative Literature Volume 135.5 (2020), guest eds. Ayesha Ramachandran, Rocco Rubini, and Sarah van der Laan, 1094-1107.

 “Critical imitatio: Renaissance literary theory and its postmodern avatars” in The Reception of Aristotelian Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Bryan Brazeau. (Bloomsbury, 2020).

 “Cosmic Matters: Spenser, Donne and the Philosophic Poem,” in Spenser & Donne: Thinking Poets, ed. Yulia Ryzhik. (Manchester University Press, 2019).

 “The Uses of Lyric in the Orlando Furioso,” MLN 133.1 (2019): 112-26. Special Issue for Ariosto 500.

 “How to Theorize the “World”: An Early Modern Manifesto,” NLH: New Literary History 48.4 (2017): 655-84.

Edited Volumes & Exhibits

World, Globe, Planet: Macrocosmic Thinking in Early Modernity, A Special Issue of Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 62:1 (2022) co-edited with Joseph Campana. (pub. 2024)       

Lyric Thinking: Poetry in the World, Model Research Collection Exhibit for the Anne T. and Robert M Bass Library, Yale University. Digital Exhibition online.  (2021-22)

Multiplicities: Critical Approaches to the Early Modern Global. A Special Issue of Modern Philology Volume 119.1 (2021), guest edited with Carina Johnson.

Lines of Beauty: History, Aesthetics & Renaissance Literature. A Special Issue of MLN, Volume 135.5 (2020), guest edited with Rocco Rubini and Sarah Van der Laan.

Spenser and the Human, A Special Issue of Spenser Studies, Volume XXX (2016), guest edited with Melissa Sanchez.