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Mr Azad Ashim Sharma

Positions held:
  • Associate Tutor, Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Azad Ashim Sharma is the director of the87press and author of Against the Frame (Barque 2017 / Broken Sleep Books 2022), Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books 2022) and the forthcoming Boiled Owls. He is a CHASE-funded PhD candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College where he is working on a novel and a book of critical theory. His poetry and essays have been published internationally through the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Small Press Traffic, Pratik, SPAMzine, and Magma Magazine. He is currently an Associate Tutor in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.

  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • Creative and Critical Writing
    • Marxism and Critical Theory
    • Postcolonial Studies and Decolonisation
    • Modernist, Late-Modernist, and Contemporary Poetry
    • Black Study
    • Experimental Writing

    Research overview

    Currently working on a PhD in English and Humanities


    Thesis Title


    Post-Apartheid as Method: Late Colonialism, Creolisation, and Creative-Critical Literary Testimony.


    Summary


    My practice-based PhD will produce a novel which explores Post-Apartheid traumas across different generations and scales, from world-historical to personal. It focuses on a tri-generational London-based family and juxtaposes older generation’s memories of Apartheid with challenges faced by a graduate student in the wake of Brexit. It captures unique transnational experiences of a twice-displaced racialised community. I use interdisciplinary research, allowing critical discourse to inform creative narrative. I work with: Apartheid-era memoirs, field interviews, trauma and affect theories, phenomenologies of touch (haptics), human rights, racialisation, and archival records of Indian-South-African activists. The novel is prefaced by a critical foreword which explores the ongoing ramifications of colonialism in the 21st Century UK in which experimental forms of cultural production are seen as in opposition to national culture(s) as space(s) geared towards war, racism, and ethnic absolutism. 

    Research Centres and Institutes

    Research clusters and groups

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Independent Reading Portfolio: The Short Story (AREN004H4)
    • Disciplining Sex: Sexuality, Society and Modern Literary Culture (AREN019S7)
    • Writing The Self (AREN238S7)