Department of English

Rahul Sapra
Associate Professor
Ph.D Queen's University

Office: JOR 1025
Phone: 416-979-5000 ext 6140
E-mail: rsapra@ryerson.ca

Dr. Rahul Sapra completed his M.A. and M. Phil in English at the University of Delhi, where he also taught as tenured faculty. He completed his PhD at Queen’s University in 2004, where he was also honoured with a Teaching Fellowship from 2004 to 2005. While in India, he completed a course in film studies from the prestigious Film and Television Institute in Pune. He also works as a journalist and has published for The Statesman and Encyclopedia Britannica. His research interests include Renaissance literatures, Shakespearean Drama, Literary Theory, Postcolonial Studies and Third-World Cinema. His book The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India explores early-modern European representations of South Asia. The book exposes the ahistorical and essentialist tendencies in the works of theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Kate Teltscher and others. The book has been praised for making “a useful contribution to the revisionist assault on Said's Orientalism” (Times Literary Supplement).  

His current research deals with Shakespearean drama in India and challenges the Postcolonial and Poststructuralist readings which negate and misrepresent the impact of Shakespeare in India. He has also conducted a joint-workshop on Shakespearean theatre for over one hundred students for the well-known Shakespeare Society of St. Stephen’s College in Delhi University, and another workshop on Indian Shakespearean Cinema for Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication (New Delhi). He is the Subject Editor for the Film Section of Routledge’s Online Encyclopedia on Modernism (Forthcoming), and he is also on the Advisory Board of the ACT magazine published by Atelier Theatre (New Delhi).

Selected Publications:

• The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India. Newark: University of Delaware Press (Co-Published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group), 2011.
• “Orientalism or Capitalism: Hastings and the Rhetoric of Empire”. Collection on Significant Events and People of British India. Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, 2008. 19-30.
•  “Shakespeare’s Intellectual Background: A Postmodern Perspective”. Collection of Essays on Shakespeare’s Intellectual Background. Delhi: Viva, 2008. 276-290.
• “Akbar’s Dream: Religious Toleration and English Transculturation in Mughal India”. Modern Philology, University of Chicago Press, 2007 (Co-Authored with Dr. Paul Stevens). 379-411.
• “The Favourable Representations of the Mughals in the English Travel Narratives”. Renaissance and Reformation. University of Toronto, 2006. 5-36.