About Me

Vivek Santayana

I am a postdoctoral researcher working on themes of epistemic justice in speculative fiction by women writers from marginalised positions in the global south. I am interested in how speculative fiction presents different imaginations of ‘futurity’, particularly through movements and sub-genres like, africanfuturism and indigenous futurisms, in ways that reject the colonial ideologies manigested in the sf canon.

You can find out more about me from my various profiles here:

My profile on the web site for the Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at Edinburgh if you are interested in a more general sense of what it is I am doing;

And a mention of me being an associate fellow of Critique in the School of Social and Political Sciences, if you were interested in the specifics of my research.

Education

2016 — 2021: PhD English Literature
University of Edinburgh
Thesis: Most Difficult and Lease Glamorous: the Politics of Style in the Late Works of Nadine Gordimer

2015 — 2016: MSc Literature and Modernity
University of Edinburgh
Dissertation: Cinctures of Sound: Music and the Divine in the Late Poems of W.H. Auden

2011 — 2015: MA (Hons) Philosophy and English Literature
University of Edinburgh

Teaching

2017: Lecturer: Mad People’s History and Identity
Course organised jointly by CAPS Advocacy and Queen Margaret University
Lecturing on lived experience of mental illness, epistemic justice, and the reclaiming of testimonial agency through collective advocacy

2019 — 2020: Tutor: English Literature 1
Pre-Honours undergraduate survey course covering a general introduction to literary form and genre, as well as time periods from the Medieval to the Victorian period.

2018 — 2019: Tutor: English Literature 2
Pre-Honours undergraduate survey course covering time periods from the High Victorian to Late Modernist periods.

Publications

Articles

Santayana, Vivek. ‘His Own Chernobyl: The Embodiment of Radiation and the Resistance to Nuclear Extractivism in Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life.’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (July 2020), doi: 10.1177/0021989420933987
Santayana, Vivek. ‘By the “Flash of Fireies”: Multi-Focal Forms of Critique in Nadine Gordimer’s Late Short Story Cycles.’ Commonwealth Essays and Studies 41. 2 (2019): 91-102