Ankhi Mukherjee

Professor Ankhi Mukherjee holds the position of Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and serves as a Tutorial Fellow at Wadham College. Her academic career spans roles such as Chair of Moderations/Prelims (2010–2012) and co-convener of Victorian and World Literature MSt programs (2019–2021). She is also a co-host of the long-running postcolonial studies seminar at Wadham College with Elleke Boehmer.

Her research focuses on postcolonial literature, world literatures, and the intersections of psychoanalysis with race, migrancy, and urban poverty. Key works include Aesthetic Hysteria (2007), What Is a Classic? (2014)—which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize—and Unseen City (2021), an interdisciplinary study of global urban poverty and psychoanalysis. She is co-editing Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (2022) and under contract for an Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction to Postcolonial Literature.

Professor Mukherjee teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Victorian literature, postcolonial theory, and psychoanalysis. She has supervised fifteen doctoral students, guiding research on topics such as partition narratives, disability in postcolonial literature, and the relationship between literature and neuroscience. Her editorial work includes roles at English Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.

Her research has been supported by the British Academy, AHRC, Wellcome Trust, and John Fell Fund. She has held visiting fellowships at The Australian National University (2014) and Johns Hopkins University (2019). She contributes to the EXPeditions educational platform, discussing global urban poverty and psychoanalysis through videos tied to her work on Unseen City.