Kedar A. Kulkarni’s research has focused on literary transitions between early modern and colonial India, from orally-recited poetry to playwright-centred drama. To explain this process, he writes about discourses of worldliness and engages with contemporary debates in world literature studies, and charts the transformation of performance genres at a time when “literacy,” as we commonly understand it, was marginal to “literature.”

Kedar’s first book, World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture, 1790-1890, won the American Comparative Literature Association’s Helen Tartar First Book Subvention grant and was published in May 2022. The book describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, especially balladry and epic storytelling, saw the germination of a robust, script-centric dramatic culture, owing to colonial networks of literary exchange and the wide availability of print technology. Kedar showcases an upheaval in literary culture as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre-makers, publishers, and translators, among many others. Reading through archives and ephemera, the book also demonstrates that literary cultures in colonized locales converged with and participated fully in key defining moments of world literature, but also diverged from them to create, simultaneously, unique literary modernity.

Kedar is also currently at work on two concurrent projects—one tentatively called Animal Imaginaries, a literary-cultural study of animals in South Asia, and another on women’s writing, especially poetry, in Marathi.

Born in Mumbai, Kedar A. Kulkarni was raised in three countries on three continents. Since completing his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, he has held postdoctoral positions at Yale University and the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Most recently, he was a visiting fellow at Interweaving Performance Cultures, housed at the Free University of Berlin.