Kalrav Vashishtha
PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies (2025鈥�)
Email: kalrav.vashishtha@warwick.ac.uk
Supervisors: Professor Mike Niblett and Dr Caitlin Vandertop
Funding: Chancellor's International Scholarship
About
Kalrav is a first-year doctoral researcher in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at 糖心TV. His project examines the representations of human-plant entanglements in contemporary postcolonial historical novels. It explores how these world-literary texts demonstrate multispecies relations as governed by, yet also disrupting the extractive logics of colonial capitalism鈥攚ithin specific ecological sites, namely, gardens, plantations and forests, and in the ecological routes of transnational trade networks and botanical explorations.
Research Interests
Plant Humanities | Historical Fiction Studies | World-Literary Studies | FolklorePublications
July 2025: Vashishtha, Kalrav, and Tulika Chandra. 鈥�.鈥� Journal of American Folklore, vol. 138, no. 549, pp. 277鈥�299.
June 2025: Vashishtha, Kalrav. 鈥�.鈥� The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2025, pp. 75鈥�87.
Conference Papers
November 2025: "Excavating Botanical Pasts in the Postcolonial Historical Novel." Historical Fiction in/and the Anthropocene, Historical Fictions Research Network.
October 2024: "South Asian Children鈥檚 Literature and the Aesthetics of Climate Change." Climate Emergency: When Popular Cultures Cry Out for an Ecological Awakening, Popular Culture Association of France and La Rochelle University.
July 2024: "Charismatic Megaflora and Environmental Artivism: The Language of Ents in The Lord of the Rings." Ecopoetics and Environmental Artivism, London Arts-Based Research Centre.