Dr Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy is Permanent Lecturer in French at Christ Church College. She completed her PhD in French at the University of Cambridge. She held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Refugee Studies Centre alongside a Sir William Golding Junior Research Fellowship at Brasenose College. Ashwiny's research focuses on postcolonial and contemporary literature and culture, notions of identities, race, gender, migration, refugees, home, hauntings, human rights, ecology, ethics and compassion. Her first monograph, Locating Hybridity (2015) centred language, identities and embodiment in Francophone Ananda Devi's works. Her second monograph, Migrant Masculinities in Women's Writing (2021) examined gender, race, hospitality, community and vulnerability in works by writers from Cameroon, Senegal, China, Mauritius, Algeria and Vietnam. Her most recent monograph, Refugee Afterlives (2024) engages with two generations of Francophone and Anglophone Vietnamese refugee (s') children's works across genres and forms, focusing on axes of home, hauntings and hunger. Her current book project looks at memoirs and documentaries of refugee children's experiences across geographical spaces. She has also published on works by: Assia Djebar, Kim Thúy, Léonora Miano, Fatou Diome, Malika Mokkedem, Charles Habonimana and Ananda Devi. Her interdisciplinary work has been published in Journal of Intercultural Studies and Children's Geographies. Ashwiny is also interested in film and the ethics of film making.
List of Publications:
Monographs
(2024) Refugee Afterlives: Home, Hauntings, and Hunger (Liverpool University Press)
(2021) Migrant Masculinities in Women’s Writing: (In)Hospitality, Community and Vulnerability (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham)
(2015) Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identities and Body Politics. (Peter Lang, Bern)
Edited Volume
(2022) (co-edited with Alice Roullière) Catching Up with Time: Belatedness and Anachronies in Francophone Literature and Culture (Peter Lang, Oxford)
Published peer reviewed articles and book chapters
(2026) 'Recurrent Spectres: Children on the Move between Calais and the UK', Children's Geographies, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2026.2659335
(2025) ‘Queer Passing and Diasporic Aesthetics in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020) and Kama La Mackerel’s Zom Fam (2021)’ in The Edinburgh Companion to The Millennial Novel edited by Chris Lloyd and Loïc Bourdeau, EUP.
(2024) ‘Crossing Borders in Two Francophone Texts: Ying Chen’s Les Lettres chinoises and Ananda Devi’s Les Hommes qui me’, in Thakkar, A., Baker, B., Harris, C. (eds) Border Masculinities . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-68050-2_3
(2024) ‘Refugee Memoirs: Kouamé’s Revenu des ténèbres (2018), Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) and the challenge of refugee narratives’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqae066
(2024) ‘Encountering Nations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 45.5, 811-816, https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2024.2391160
(2024) ‘Ambivalent Encounters in Calais’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2024.2365759
(2024) '“Against the Flow”: Exile and “Willful Subjects”' in Malika Mokeddem’s Mes Hommes and Kim Thúy’s Vi, Contemporary Women's Writing, 2024,vpad024,
https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpad024
(2023) ‘Post-migratory Identities: Changing Masculinities in Kim Thúy’s Vi’ in Touching Beauty: The Poetics of Kim Thúy, Eds Miléna Santoro and Jack Yeagar, Queen-McGill UP.
(2021c) ‘“Chez moi pas chez moi”: Home(lessness) in Kim Thúy’s Narratives’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies (Journal), 1-17,
(2021b) ‘Elsewhere Home: Hospitality, Affect and Language in Chen’s Lettres chinoises and Thúy’s Vi’ in Quebec Studies (Journal), 71, 91-110.
(2021a) ‘“Nothing Ever Dies”: Memory and Marginal Children’s voices in Rwandan and Vietnamese Refugee Writing’ in Journal of the British Academy, 9 (s3), 157-172.
(2020b) ‘Dire l’indicible: Children, Trauma and Post-war Silences in Kim Thúy’s Ru and Grace Ly’s Jeune fille modèle’ in International Journal of Francophone Studies, 23 (1&2), 99–117.
(2020a) ‘Disrupting Homogeneous Nation-space: The Black Male Body and the Migrant Woman Writer’s Gaze (Léonora Miano and Fatou Diome)’ in L’Esprit Créateur (Journal), 60 (2), 41-54.
(2019) ‘Le pays, c’était comme la femme d’un autre’: Reconceptualising African Migrant Masculinity in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique and Léonora Miano’s Tels des astres éteints’, Special Issue of Itinéraires (Journal) on La renaissance littéraire africaine en débat 2019, 1.
(2015b) ‘Victimes ou bourreaux? : Ecrire les hommes dans Le Sari vert, Blue Bay Palace et Les Hommes qui me parlent ‘ Interculturel Francophonie (Journal), 28, 135-156.
(2015a) ‘The Twice-displaced: Mapping Alternative Diasporic Identities in Works by Ananda Devi and Nathacha Appanah’, Journal of South Asian Diaspora Studies, 7(2), 167-181.
(2014) ‘Les Voix de la Coolitude: Entre harmonie et dissonances (Maryse Condé, Shiva Naipaul et Ananda Devi)’, Les Cahiers du GRELCEF (Journal), 5, 19-36.
(2013b) ‘Rebelles, prostituées et meurtrières dans les romans d’Ananda Devi’, in Rebelles et criminelles chez les écrivaines d’expression française, edited by Colette Trout and Frédérique Chevillot, Rodopi, Boston, 115-128.
(2013a) ‘The Human-Animal in Ananda Devi’s Texts: Towards an Ethics of Hybridity?’ in Women’s Writing in Twentieth Century France, edited by Gill Rye and Amaleena Damlé, University of Wales Press, 127-140.
(2012) ‘Almost White but not Quite: A Comparative Reading of Ferblanc's Hybridity in Ananda Devi's Soupir’ Comparative Critical Studies (Journal) Volume 9, pp 319-332.
(2011b) ‘Interrogating Identity: Psychological Dislocations in the Novels of Ananda Devi’, Dalhousie French Studies (Journal), 94, 27-38.
(2011a) ‘Représenter l’altérité: le corps grotesque dans l’oeuvre Romanesque d’Ananda Devi’ in Ecrivaines mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, edited by Srilata Ravi and Véronique Bragard, L’Harmattan, Paris, 179-193.
(2010) ‘L’ex-il/île ou l’île intérieure: l’île Maurice dans l’oeuvre romanesque d’Ananda Devi’, Palabres: Revue d’études francophones (Journal), edited by Eileen Lohka and Selom Gbanou, XI (2), 93-110.