Expertise
Torsa Ghosal is a scholar of contemporary literature and a creative writer. Her primary research interests are in the fields of 20th-/21st- century Global Anglophone literature and cognitive cultural studies. Her scholarship also covers narrative theory; media studies; digital humanities; and disability studies. Across her research projects, she studies the relationship of different narrative forms with patterns of thinking and new media platforms.
Her first monograph, Out of Mind: Mode, Mediating, and Cognition in Twenty-First Century Narrative (The Ohio State University Press, 2021) analyzes how thought is conceptualized in contemporary literature and culture. Situating literature within groundbreaking debates on memory, perception, abstraction, and computation, Out of Mind shows how stories not only reflect historical beliefs about how minds work but also participate in their reappraisal.
Dr. Ghosal is the editor of a book of scholarly essays titled Global Perspectives on Digital Literature (Routledge, 2023), which explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations, and co-editor (with Dr. Alison Gibbons) of Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), which seeks to understand how fiction is distinguished from other forms of discourse, especially in the so-called 'post-truth' era.
As a creative writer, Dr. Ghosal incorporates ethnography, literary theory, and South Asian history into fictions and essays, and she is a literary translator from Bangla to English. Her writings are typically concerned with how we, as individual human beings, see ourselves in relation to others: how we identify with one another but also ruthlessly draw lines in the name of religion, ethnicity, and so on, to delimit our empathy. Her experimental novella, Open Couplets, published by South Asia’s leading feminist publisher Yoda Press, is a meditation on how class and gender shape art in South Asia, and the story unfolds through a chain of emails. It is a genre-bending, multimodal work, deeply influenced by her scholarly research on cognition and digital culture. Dr. Ghosal is currently working on a new novel.