Apala BhowmickNat C. Robertson Science and Society Graduate Fellow, 2024-25
Apala Bhowmick is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the English department. She is interested in modes of comparative colonialisms under British and French regimes in Africa and the Caribbean region. Her research primarily spans the 20th and 21st centuries. Working with Anglophone alongside Francophone texts, Apala’s dissertation-in-progress focuses on fiction that articulates transimperial processes of environmental despoilation through the use of complex, often non-normative, narratological strategies. Apala is particularly interested in how historical relationships between racial labor and capital generation are connected to the inception, development, and dissemination of scientific disciplines within epistemological networks in the European metropole. As allied research interests, Apala looks at world cinema and translation, in some of her public scholarship.
Apala has presented her work at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 2021, the African Literature Association conference in 2022, and the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies in 2024. Prior to beginning her PhD, she has worked in the editorial departments of, both, trade as well as academic publishing houses in India.
