Alya Ansari is a Ph.D. candidate in the program in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, with a graduate minor in Moving Image, Media, and Sound Studies. Her dissertation juxtaposes nineteenth-century British and Indian novels to argue that these novels about industrial society in the imperial metropole and colonial periphery share a certain treatment of narrative time. The dissertation then takes up this configuration of time and space in the novel—a configuration which Alya calls the chronotope of “combined and uneven development”—in readings of twenty-first century Anglophone novels in order to show how the experience of time specific to the productive rhythms of capital produces a certain set of ideologies about work.
Alya is also an Assistant Editor at Cultural Critique.

Image courtesy Maya Rait. Cover illustration courtesy Adam Ahlgrim & Maldo Malacek.