British Council’s Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow: 2019-20
Home Institution: Department of English, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), India.
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Project: (Re) Framing the ‘Honour Killing’ Phenomenon: Contextualising the Literary Response to Gendered Violence through Translation
Umesh Kumar teaches at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University (BHU) since 2015. Apart from teaching canonical courses in British literature, his research interests include (Indian) Bhasha literatures, translation studies, children’s literature and gendered-violence studies. During the last five years, his work has appeared in leading scholarly journals of humanities and social sciences including languages such as Sahitya Akademi, Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi) Translation Today, Contemporary Voice of Dalit (Sage), Muse India, Vani Prakashan, among others.
For 2019-20, he was British Council’s Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, the UK. The fellowship was held jointly at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS) during the year’s autumn term.
In 2018, the prestigious NIDA School of Translation Studies, Italy invited him to participate in its summer school as an Associate Fellow. He identifies himself as a ‘committed’ translator and publishes regularly in the field. Besides academic writing, he makes an attempt to establish a meaningful dialogue with the general public as well through his creative pieces. In the recent past, his pieces in The Hindu, The Wire, and The Round Table India have garnered huge responses from India and abroad.
Before joining BHU, Dr Kumar earned degrees in English from the University of Pune (B.A., M.A.) and the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (Ph.D.).