About

Ayesha Ramachandran is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her scholarship focuses on the literatures and cultures of early modern Europe, exploring the disciplinary, theoretical, and material challenges posed by globalization from the late fifteenth century to the present. Her work emphasizes the making of worlds through interdisciplinary relations between art and science, including poetry, philosophy, cartography, visual and print culture. She primarily works with the English, French, and Italian literary traditions, while also extending her research to Portuguese, Spanish, Neo-Latin, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and their associated Arabic intertexts. Her approach connects traditional methods such as philology, book history, and historical phenomenology with efforts to decolonize literary canons and frameworks by engaging with colonial and postcolonial theory, anthropology, and critical archival studies. Her first book, 'The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe,' charts transnational encounters and mechanisms of early globalization, placing literary texts in dialogue with maps, scientific instruments, philosophical treatises, and works of art. This prize-winning work was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015 and received several awards, including the MLA’s Scaglione prize in Comparative Literary Studies. Her forthcoming book, 'Lyric Thinking: Towards a Global Poetics,' offers a transhistorical and comparative account of lyric poetry from the early modern period to contemporary times, emphasizing the lyric’s existential stance and its role in global poetics. She is also working on a collaborative project, 'Styles of Being: Early Modern Ontologies Now,' which investigates links between anthropology and cross-cultural encounters during the early modern period. Ramachandran serves as a co-editor of Spenser Studies and has guest edited multiple journal special issues. She has authored over thirty essays and received numerous grants and fellowships, including a Mellon New Directions Fellowship and a John Carter Brown Long-term Fellowship. Her teaching spans undergraduate and graduate levels, covering foundational courses in comparison, global Shakespeare, lyric poetry, early modern intellectual history, and literary theory. She has been recognized for her interdisciplinary pedagogy with awards such as the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Humanities
• Geometry
• Art
• Mathematics
• Parallel computing
• Philosophy
• History
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Luborsky on <i>The Shepheardes Calender</i>

  Spenser Studies A Renaissance Poetry Annual · 2026-01-01

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• The Poetics of Shakespearian Erasure: Lyric Thinking with Bhanu Kapil and Preti Taneja

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-07

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• Recycling Shakespeare: Mullen and the Lyric Tradition

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2024-08-04

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• Contents

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2024-05-28

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• Poetic fire

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2024-05-28

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• Faerieland’s Cannibal Metaphysics: Spenser with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

  Spenser Studies A Renaissance Poetry Annual · 2023 · 1 citations

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  • Humanities
  • Philosophy
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  This essay places Spenser in the company of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and explores how ontological pluralism might afford a rich, provocative approach to the worlds of The Faerie Queene. We begin with an example of how Viveiros de Castro’s work might allow a specific episode from Book V to be reimagined. We then offer an overview of his anthropological writings, exploring both his historical account of European encounters with Amerindians in the sixteenth century and his rejection of the nature/culture distinction as typically deployed by anthropologists in favor of a “multinaturalism” informed by Amazonian cosmologies. Noting how Viveiros de Castro’s rethinking of cannibalism, as a practice that involves incorporating the perspective of the other, resonates with the place of this practice in Book VI of Spenser’s poem, we consider the symbolic entanglements of the Salvage Nation with the key themes of the Book of Courtesy. Cannibalism emerges not just as a projection of European fantasies but as a way of reckoning with the constitutive role of absolute alterity.

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• A New Category: Discoveries

  Spenser Studies A Renaissance Poetry Annual · 2022-01-01

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• Spenser

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-04-20

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  Providing an overview of Edmund Spenser’s ‘shorter poems’, this chapter places them in a dialogic relationship to <italic>The Faerie Queene</italic> and to each other, highlighting their revolutionary treatment of genre and poetic self-presentation. It highlights Spenser’s practices of generic innovation, imitation, multilingual intertextual allusion, translation, and his persistent interest in the appropriate place of poetry in the sociopolitical world. Focusing both on literary technique and the cultural politics of Elizabethan poetry, the chapter demonstrates how Spenser’s poetry reflects on the writing of epic, lyric, and court poetry. Most of all, it argues that the shorter poems are where Spenser gleefully flaunts his learning, his humanistic commitments, and the pleasure of poetic play—characteristics that locate him amongst the foremost European poets of his generation.

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• Shakespeare and the Ethics of the Global: An Interview with Preti Taneja

  Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 · 2022-12-01

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  Abstract: A wide-ranging conversation among Joseph Campana, Ayesha Ramachandran, and Preti Taneja about Taneja's novel We That Are Young and its relationships both to Shakespeare's King Lear and to the themed issue's focus, "World, Globe, Planet."

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• New World, No World

  2022-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Ayesha Ramachandran, “New World, No World: Seeking Utopia in Padmanabhan’s ‘Harvest’”, in Theatre Research International, vol. 30, no. 2 (2005), pages 161–174. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press via Copyright Clearance Center. Thenceforth, all flesh had to be sown with salt, to

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Frequent coauthors

• Joseph Campana

  2 shared

• Sarah Van der Laan

  Indiana University

  2 shared

• Susannah Brietz Monta

  2 shared

• Melissa E. Sanchez

  2 shared

• Jean‐Claude Carron

  1 shared

• David L. Miller

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

  1 shared

• Elisabeth Hodges

  Miami University

  1 shared

• Dominique Brunet-Bertrand

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• MLA’s Scaglione prize in Comparative Literary Studies (2017)
• Milton Society of America’s Shawcross Prize for the best boo…
• Sixteenth Century Studies Association’s Founder’s Prize for…
• Mellon New Directions Fellowship
• Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant