Professor Roy studied English, French, and Indian literature at the University of Mumbai before pursuing a Ph.D. at La Sorbonne Nouvelle. During her doctorate, she taught courses in Postcolonial Studies and Literature as well as history and civilisation courses in French universities and grandes écoles. She joined the American University in 2014 where she teaches English and Comparative Literature courses, often drawing from her research in classical and contemporary trends in epic. Her forthcoming book Postcolonial Epic, a revised version of her thesis manuscript, identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic—“postcolonial epic”—prefigured by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a founding text of North America, and exemplified by Derek Walcott’s Caribbean masterpiece Omeros and Amitav Ghosh’s South Asian saga Ibis trilogy. Postcolonial Epic demonstrates the epic genre’s rich potential to articulate and interrogate postcolonial concerns of cultural hybridity, historical revisionism, and post-independence nation-building across the Global North/South divide. Professor Roy has continued to explore hybrid theoretical frameworks bridging classical and postcolonial paradigms in articles published in Commonwealth Essays and Studies and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She is currently working on varied projects, notably a chapter for a volume on Amitav Ghosh in the MLA series “Approaches to Teaching World Literature” and entries for Le Dictionnaire des littératures de l’Inde.
Co-editor of an issue of a Journal —. 2014. With Madeleine Laurencin, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 36.2.
Articles in Peer-reviewed Journals
Chapters