Literature: Restoration and 18th-Century British literature; nationalism, imperialism, and literary culture; postcolonial and world literature, esp. South Asian; anthologies of African American writing
Alok Yadav teaches courses on Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial and World Literature, such as Engl 450 (Eighteenth-Century English Novel), Engl 404 (The Augustan Age), Engl 350 (The Idea of a World Literature) and special topics courses on the African and South Asian Novel and on Empire and English Literature. He received his PhD from Cornell University, and taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago before joining the English Department at George Mason. He is the author of Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004) and of the digital project Anthologies of African American Writing (soft launch 2021), and has published essays and reviews on issues of nationalism, empire, eighteenth-century British literary culture, and fictionality in Clio, Criticism, Cultural Critique, ELH, Literature Compass, Modern Philology, Novel, and Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research.
He is currently working on a digital project on anthologies of African American literature (enumerative bibliography, documentation of covers, index of contents, and reception history), as well as on a book on Kipling's Kim and political criticism of literature.
Anthologies of African American Writing. Digital project. 2021- .
"Picaresque Novel." The Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Peter Melville Logan, et al. 2 vols. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
"Literature, Fictiveness, and Postcolonial Criticism." Novel 43.1 (2010): 189-96.
Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
"Fractured Meanings: Hudibras and the Historicity of the Literary Text." ELH 62 (1995): 529-49.
"Nationalism and Contemporaneity: Political Economy of a Discourse." Cultural Critique 26 (1993-94): 191-229.
GMU Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence (CTFE), Faculty Learning Community (FLC) grant, 2017-18 (co-facilitator with Eric Anderson and Tamara Harvey)
Fenwick Fellowship, GMU Libraries, 2017-18
Study Leave, George Mason University, 2007-08
NEH Faculty Workshop Grant (with John Foster, Amal Amireh, Tamara Harvey, and Joel Foreman), Fall 2005-Fall 2006
Mathy Junior Faculty Fellowship, George Mason University, Spring 2000
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1992-94
Cornell Graduate Fellowship, 1988-89
Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 1986
A.D. White Fellowship, Cornell University, 1986
Commonwealth Fellowship, Great Britain, 1986 (declined)
Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Special M.A. Scholarship, 1986 (declined)
ENGH 305: Dimensions of Writing and Literature
ENGH 308: Theory and Inquiry (What Is Fiction?)
ENGL 330: Augustan Age 1660-1745
ENGH 331: Age of Sensibility 1745-1800
ENGL 345: Empire and English Literature: Marlowe to Kipling
ENGL 350: The Idea of a World Literature
ENGH 431: Literature of the Enlightenment
ENGL 450: Eighteenth Century British Novel
ENGH 453: Topics in Fiction: Nobel Prize Fiction
ENGH 458: Past & Present: The Challenge of Reading Older Literary Works
ENGL 500: Research in English Studies
ENGL 635: Eighteenth-Century British
Ph.D. in English, Cornell University, 1993
B.A. (with high distinction), University of Toronto, 1986
“Anthologies of African American Literature: The Second Life of Literary Works.” Historical Poetics Now Symposium, U of Texas, Austin, 10 Nov. 2019.
"An Online Bibliography of Anthologies of African American Writing: Literary History and Digital Scholarship: A Modest Proposal." Fenwick Fellows talk. GMU Libraries. 17 April 2019.
Interviewed for Lynn Neary. “Swedish Academy to Name 2 Nobel Laureates in Literature in 2019, After Missing 2018.” All Things Considered. NPR. 9 Oct. 2019.
Interviewed for Andrew Limbong. “No Nobel in Literature This Year Following a Sexual Assault Scandal.” Morning Edition. NPR. 4 Oct. 2018