Bio
Alan Johnson is a Professor of English at Idaho State University.
His expertise is in postcolonial literature and theory, with an emphasis on South Asia, especially India, where he was born. He teaches a variety of other courses besides his speciality area, such as the novel, major figures (e.g., Rushdie and Naipaul), literary theory, postcolonial ecocriticism, comparative literature, South Asian literature and popular culture, writing about literature, and honors humanities. In 2010, he was a Fulbright lecturer in India, focusing on globalization and the place of literature, and he’s traveled throughout India for research, conferences, and talks. His current project is an interdisciplinary study of literary and popular depictions of the jungle in Indian literature, which draws on, among other fields, postcolonial critique and ecocriticism. Other projects: Hindi (Bollywood) film studies; religion and literature in India. He has written two books, Postcolonial Literature Today, co-edited with Jagdish Batra (New Delhi: Prestige, 2015) and Out of Bounds: Anglo-Indian Literature and the Geography of Displacement. (Univ. of Hawai’i, 2011).
He is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar based in Chennai.