Toying with Childhood (PDF)

Usha Mudiganti teaches English at Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. She has designed and taught courses in children's literature, British and American literature, and literatures of the Indian subcontinent at the undergraduate, postgraduate, and research levels. Her research interests include the study of childhoods in literature, gender studies, psychoanalytic theory, and popular culture studies. Her interest in the study of childhood began during her master's degree in English at the University of Hyderabad, India. In her MPhil dissertation at the University of Hyderabad, she highlighted the lack of substantial depictions of girlhood even in bildungsroman novels with girl protagonists in late Victorian and Early Edwardian England. She obtained her Ph D in 2007 from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, for her thesis on the reification of childhood in Anglo-American literature of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Her latest publications include 'Through the Lens of Childhood: Kipling's Claim to India' in Kipling in India: India in Kipling (2021), Eds. Harish Trivedi and Jan Montefiore, 'Virangana', in Keywords for India (2020), Eds. Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza, and '"Et tu, Brute?": The Child Soldier and the Child Victim in Shobasakthi's Traitor' in Childhood Traumas: Narrative and Representations (2020), Eds. Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani.