Ash Jayamohan

Thesis title: Under Pressure: Modernism and the Grasp

Biography

Background

I have degrees in English literature from Stella Maris College, University of Madras (B.A.) and the University of Edinburgh (M.Sc.). I worked briefly in publishing and feminist research in New Delhi before returning to Edinburgh to begin my doctoral studies, supported by the University's Global Research Scholarship.

Alongside my Ph.D., I have worked on student engagement research, curriculum development, and EDI initiatives in higher education. 

Responsibilities & affiliations

I was a Reader for the James Tait Black Prize in Biography (2021-23).

I served as Editor-in-Chief (2022–23) and Deputy Editor (2021-22) at FORUM Journal. Based at the LLC, FORUM is the University's open-access and peer-reviewed postgraduate journal for culture and the arts.

I am a member of the stellar Edinburgh Life Writing Network.

Undergraduate teaching

  • Introduction to Queer Studies (ECA, 2020–23)
  • Literary Studies 1B (LLC, 2021–22)

Research summary

My doctoral project explores the 'grasp' in modernist writing, insofar as this everyday act, as Édouard Glissant writes, indexes a "a gesture of enclosure if not appropriation". In my readings of D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Aubrey Menen, as well as Bhanu Kapil, the gesture of the grasp (of seizing, grabbing, and/or crushing something, like a lover, an idea, a stranger, a child, or sand) registers something of the violence of 'knowing' within modernity. The grasp, in these texts, seeks to diagnose, interpret, and manipulate as a form of governance. It also, crucially, seeks to preclude the freedom of the 'grasped' to know and be known otherwise (or not at all). The grasp therefore emerges in my project as the force of a will-to-know, collapsed into a will-to-possess: a truly coercive pressure on bodies that seem to desire, look, sense, and understand differently. Nonetheless, I demonstrate how my chosen texts also make palpable alternate, less pressing 'pressures' of knowing and being known. I propose that these queerer pressures of relation (flirtatious; shared; withdrawn; passive) are able to defuse, if only ever provisionally, the grasp as modernity's governing gesture. The grasp is therefore a contested site in my research: a meta/physical gesture that draws our attention to dynamic subjects-in-relation.

For my study of the grasp, I draw on Glissant, Roland Barthes, and psychoanalysis after Jean Laplanche.

Project activity

I was the co-organiser of Fin de Sexe?: A Symposium on Sexuality (2024), funded by the University of Edinburgh's Student Experiences Grant.

I was the co-editor of Scrap Lines (2021), a creative zine on marginalised knowledges ('queer trash'), also funded by the Student Experiences Grant.

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