Dr Varna Venugopal

IAS/CWIT Fellow at Stephenson College, January - March 2026

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Varna Venugopal is an independent researcher and early-career scholar working in the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. She recently completed her PhD in English at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (Chennai, India). Her research is broadly situated at the intersection of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and literary criticism, and she is interested in exploring how literary and cultural narratives from India articulate a sense of ‘environmentality’ and represent diverse forms of human–nonhuman entanglements. Her work draws on a range of emerging approaches within the environmental humanities, including literary and cultural plant studies, the blue humanities, literature(s) of the Anthropocene, poetics of the Plantationocene, environmental justice, postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental life writing, and children’s environmental literature and media. 

Dr Venugopals’s doctoral research centred around recent developments within ecocriticism, particularly as the field increasingly focuses on reading and writing in the Anthropocene, during a time marked by climate change, biodiversity loss, and species extinction. Her dissertation, titled Vegetal Encounters: plant lives, phytocriticism, and the Indian imagination, analysed the representation of plants in the Indian literary imaginary, focusing on a selection of novels, life narratives, and children’s narratives published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which foreground plants in different ways. Her research explored the ways in which Indian narratives imagine and represent plants, the significations attributed to vegetal life, and the narrative strategies through which plant–human relationships are expressed in these texts. Central to the project was an effort to draw attention to ‘plant presences’ in Indian narratives, which refers both to their material presence as active agents in our physical environment and cultural practices, as well as their metaphorical presence in the form of representations, symbols, and stories. In addition to this, she has also explored the politics and poetics of ‘dam narratives’ from India that respond to the infrastructural imaginary of the mega-dam, by reading anti-dam literary narratives as instances of postcolonial hydrofiction that foreground the ‘little narratives’ of developmental oustees against the dominant accounts of India’s celebrated hydro-modernity. 

Her work has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Taylor & Francis), Children’s Literature in Education (Springer), and Lagoonscapes (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice). She has also contributed a chapter to the edited volume Environmental Humanities in India: transdisciplinary approaches to ecology and sustainability (Asia in Transition Series, Springer). In addition, a forthcoming article will be published in Bandung: Journal of the Global South as part of a special issue on “Coloniality, (In)justice, and the Literature of the Global South.” She has presented her research at international conferences, including those hosted by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH, University of Oxford), Cappadocia University (Turkey), Northumbria University (UK), and Southern Cross University (Australia). She also received the Institute Research Award (2024) from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in recognition of the quality of her doctoral research and her ability to communicate her research to non-specialist audiences. She is currently working on developing her dissertation into a book-length monograph. In the future, she hopes to write and speak about literature and the environment beyond academia.

As a fellow at the IAS, she will be a part of the IAS ‘Confronting Climate Apartheid’ major project, working in collaboration with Professor Andrew Baldwin (Geography), Dr Simona Capisani (Philosophy) and Dr Chris Szabla (Law). As part of this project, she will explore the representations of climate precarity and injustice in literary and visual narratives from India, investigating how these texts can open up new ways of thinking about a poetics of the climate apartheid. More specifically, her research will focus on how climate injustice, precarity, displacement, uninhabitability, and involuntary mobility have been narrativized in the Indian environmental imaginary, and on the generic and rhetorical tropes that have been used to frame these stories.