Vasugi Kailasam

Dr Vasugi Kailasam is a scholar of modern Tamil literatures. Her research concerns the postcolonial literature and culture of contemporary South Asia. Specifically, her work examines literatures of conflict, vernacular Tamil literatures and visual cultures and focuses particularly on narrative form and its connections to South Asian cultural identity formations, race and ethnic politics.

Dr Kailasam is currently working on two projects. Her first project is a book monograph titled Literature, Reconciliation and the Nation-State: Narrating Postcolonial Sri Lanka. This comparative literary project considers the relationships between the political project of reconciliation and the creative spaces of English and Tamil postcolonial Sri Lankan literature written from 2000 to the present. It investigates the idea literary aesthetics, particularly the mode of realism in narrating the space of the Sri Lankan nation. Her other project, Post Millennial Tamil Visual Cultures, arises from her work on global Tamil popular cultural production. This study explores the contemporary idioms of Tamil cinema and its links to modernity, Tamil identity and gendered spectatorship.