Ash Jayamohan

Thesis title: Under Pressure: Queer Modernity 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 gesture of the 'grasp' as an index of encounter -- and as signalling the looming force of the will-to-know -- in twentieth-century literature and beyond. In doing so, I draw on psychoanalytical forays into interpretation (and its violences) as constitutive of our relation to one another to bring together the queerer pressures and textures of sexual relation offered by D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Aubrey Menen, as well as Bhanu Kapil (tactful; shared; cool; light). I demonstrate how, not least in the wake of modern sexological discourse, their works stage differential dramas of touching, feeling, and knowing to complicate the production of sexual knowledge-sexual relation, and to allow us to pay closer attention to alternate modes of living and relating. These psychodramas of contact, I propose, invite us to reimagine the 'queer consistency' of relation in modern literature.

Project activity

I am the co-organiser of Fin de Sexe?: A Symposium on Sexuality (upcoming, June 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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