Anindyo Roy is Associate Professor in English and teaches critical and postcolonial theory, postcolonial African, Caribbean, and South Asian literatures as well as early twentieth-century British literature. His essays have appeared in journals such as Boundary 2, Criticism, ARIEL, Women: A Cultural Review, Colby Quarterly, Mediations and Journal X. His book entitled Civility and Empire (Routledge: London and New York, 2005) is a literary exploration of the culture of civility operating in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British colonial society. The book examines the manner in which civility came to define the ethos of the modern colonial state and emerged as a key discursive idea around which questions about education, citizenship, gender, race, labor, and bureaucratic and civil authority were negotiated. The book focuses on a wide array of colonial texts, including nineteenth-century oriental tales (e.g. Walter Scott’s The Surgeon’s Daughter), narratives about cadetship in the East India Company and about Jewish “stock jobbers,” John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography and his colonial writings, parliamentary debates about free trade, popular Anglo-Indian poetry and romances, Kipling’s imperial fiction, and the colonial stories of E.M. Forster and Leonard Woolf. His essay on the cross-dressing Victorian poet, Adela Cory Nicolson who wrote under the pseudonym "Laurence Hope," was reprinted in an anthology titled "Writing Desire." His most recent publications include an article on the postcolonial Nigerian novelist, Helon Habila, in the journal ARIEL, and an essay on the transnational Indian poet and writer, Meena Alexander.

My most recent research includes (1) a project that examines ways in which critical theory, particularly Adorno,reflects the concerns, aesthetics and critical energies visible in modernist narrative, as exemplified in Virginia Woolf; (2) a series of essays that explore the political implications of contemporary "third generation" writers from West Africa recasting the dominant mode of historical realism that dominated African postcolonial fiction, & (3) using the postcolonial critique of "national development" in the global south to explore the Indian feminist writer, Mahasweta Devi's representations of the relationship between land, indigenous people's rights, and the postcolonial State.

Civility, a normative code of behavior in 19th century Britain became a means of imposing control and effecting exclusion when transferred to the colonial world. Civility and Empire examines the manner in which civility emerged as the ethos of the British colonial state in the 19th century and formed the key discursive idea around which questions about citizenship, education, inheritance, labor, and civil authority were negotiated. The discourse of civility also provided the basis for establishing disciplinary mechanisms that were essential to managing the historical exigencies confronting the British Empire in India. The book traces the genealogy of civility in 19th and 20th century British literature that includes writers such as Walter Scott, Kipling, John Stuart Mill, E.M. Forster and Leonard Woolf, and also the history of the colonial archive that includes official documents, poetry, romances, and travel narratives from this era.

“Autobiographer, Historian, Griot: The Measures of Realism In Helon Habila’s Measuring Time”. Ariel: Journal of International Literature and the Arts. 41.1. 68-94.

“Recitations of Romanticism: Postcolonial Genealogies and the Sites of Reading in John Stuart Mill and Meena Alexander.” In Passages to Manhattan. Ed. Lopamudra Basu & Cynthia Leenerts. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009. 98-120.

“Colonialism, Decadence and the Poetics of Desire in Adela Cory Nicolson.” In Writing Desire: Nineteenth-Century Poetics. Ed. Rachel Langford. Peter Lang, 2005.

”Sheath that swathes me from top to toe”: Embodying Blackness in the Western Canon.” Thematology. Ed. Shibaji Bandopadhyay. DCE, Jadavpur University: Calcutta, 2004.

“‘Gold and Bracelet, Water and Wave”: Signature and Translation in the Indian Poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson” Women: A Cultural Review 13.2 (2002): 145-68.

“ ‘Telling Brutal Things’: Colonialism, Bloomsbury and the Crisis of Narration in Leonard Woolf’s ‘A Tale Told By Moonlight.’” Criticism 43.3 (2001): 189-201: 189-201.

“Savage Pursuits: The Shaping of Colonial Civility in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Life to Come.’” boundary 2 28.2(Summer 2001): 227-56.

“Metropolitan Civility, Bloomsbury, and the Power of the Modern Colonial State: Leonard Woolf’s ‘Pearls and Swine.’’’ Journal X: A Biannual Journal in Culture and Criticism 6.1(Fall 2001): 105-24

“ ‘Subject to Civility’: The Story of the Indian Baboo.” Colby Quarterly 37.2 (June 2001): 113-24.

“Wilson Harris.” Encarta Africana 2000. Ed. Anthony K. Appiah & Henry L. Gates, Jr.. Redmond, WA: Microsoft, 1999.

"Postcoloniality and the Politics of Identity in the Diaspora: Figuring 'Homes,' Locating Histories." Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism. Ed. Radhika Mohanram & Gita Rajan. Greenwoood P: Westpost, CT, 1995. 101-117.

“Raja Rao: Biography, Themes, Narrative Strategies, and Critical Reception." Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood P: Westport, CT, 1993. 343-56.

"The Aesthetics of an [Un]willing Immigrant: Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine and Days and Nights in Calcutta." Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson, Garland: NY, 199. 127-42.

"Nationhood, Power, Identity." Mediations 17.1(December 1992): 92-98