Professors and Publications: Dr. Jason Harris, Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya, and Dr. Emily Johansen on Recent Publications
Dr. Jason Harris, Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya, and Dr. Emily Johansen have been hard at work. In the past year, these three faculty members have all published books. Dr. Harris published Master of Rods and Strings, a horror novella about occult puppetry. Dr. Bhattacharya’s novel, Love’s Garden, is a historical novel set in both modern-day India and British-ruled India. Lastly, Beyond Safety by Emily Johansen is a scholarly nonfiction discussing risk and safety in everyday life.
Dr. Harris knew he wanted to write about puppets and their “uncanny potential as doppelgängers of humans,” but he says that Master of Rods and Strings really started with his main character Elias and his unique voice. Once he thought of the first line, “I will not deny that I have always been fascinated with puppets,” the novel drew from Elias’s voice. “I listened to him, and he listened to the puppets,” Harris said. He wrote the first drafts in the MFA program at Bowling Green State University around Fall 2013. One work that influenced his novella is Thomas Ligotti’s collection of weird horror: The Nightmare Factory. “His prose is immaculate and so carefully deployed that his stories conjure disconcerting surreal visions that feel inevitable and palpable,” and he uses human-like objects—mannequins, clowns, etc.—similarly to the way in which Dr. Harris utilizes puppets in his novella.
Master of Rods and Strings was published in July 2021. Elias begins a journey to discover the truth of occult puppetry after his sister Sonja is taken to a school by their Uncle Pavan to advance her skill. He is both jealous of her abilities and horrified by visions of her torture at the school. “Their sibling relationship is a rather gothic one, fraught with psychological ambivalence, painful anxieties, and a dark burden in the past which puts into question the nature of what their family really is as well as the dehumanizing consequences of pursuing vengeance.” Throughout the novel, Elias discovers facets of supernatural puppetry as well as “disturbing truths about traditional connections between puppets and identity.”
Dr. Bhattacharya specializes in South Asia Studies and Indian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis, Gender Theory, Film Studies, and Creative Writing. She is a professor of English at Texas A&M University and an affiliate of the Women's and Gender Studies, Africana Studies, and Film Studies programs. In 2007, Dr. Bhattacharya founded the South Asia Working Group of the Glasscock Humanities Center at Texas A&M University, and she directed it until 2017. From 2012-2014, she was Graduate Director of the English department at Texas A&M University. She has taught and published on film, world literature, feminism and visual culture, colonial and postcolonial discourse analyses of literature from the eighteenth century onwards, gender in South Asia, and travel writing. She enjoys reading Amitav Ghosh's historical fiction on South Asia, the family sagas of Amy Tan, the delightful diaspora lyrical realism of Jhumpa Lahiri, and Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie's historical sweep, among so many others. She is a devotee of the great Magical Realists Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Juan Rulfo, and Toni Morrison, and of Brit Bennet and Angela Flournoy among the talented black women writers of the day.
Her own novel, Love’s Garden, was published in October 2020, though she began writing the story nearly fifteen years ago. During this time, Dr. Bhattacharya went through what she calls an ‘Archaeology of Myself,’ which led her through her own family history and stories. Her novel began as a way to “invoke those powerful voices and figures into my felt reality, almost as soothsayers and shamans—a kind of ancestor worship, even atavism.” As she continued writing, she discovered a love for deeper and wider histories and epics, especially those in which “the individual is like the point in impressionist painting: critical but minute.” As seen in the fifty year time frame of Love’s Garden, Dr. Bhattacharya examines the layers of human history. She says that “the writer I want to become now is an archaeologist of the human condition.” Dr. Bhattacharya did not, however, always plan to write fiction. She has written in the academic sphere for years, including three scholarly books. She believes that she has become “motivated to write fiction out of a quest for the impossible.” Her academic research has prepared her to write historical fiction well. Her study of empires and cultural contact zones has given her the necessary knowledge to discuss the colonization and decolonization of India, and her women’s studies background “informs the message of women’s historic resilience, courage, friendships, and matrilineal traditions” in the novel.
Love’s Garden begins in early twentieth-century India and focuses on two girls of vastly different economic statuses. They fail to remain close and true to one another as each marries within her own economic status. Marriage and motherhood divide them, and their descendants continue to feud. As time passes, India fights fascism and as women gain more freedom, it is discovered that both women were the pawns of men. “When that story can be told, the new generations choose forgiveness and unite to build a new future and country,” Dr. Bhattacharya explains. Essentially, “Love’s Garden asks why some women embrace motherhood and others refuse it. In that sense, it is, a sort of story of resistance.”
Dr. Bhattacharya believes that “the women in Love’s Garden are embodiments of the pre-history of twentieth-century sagas of popular resistance.” This is shown Lady Prem Mitter, unhappy wife of Indian baronet Sir Mitter in Calcutta in the 1920s, doing everything in her power for the abandoned daughter of her late childhood friend. Her repeated responses to hardship and inequality “demonstrate women's honor and heroism during the most turbulent times in British-ruled India.” The story begins in 1898, so the women would not be familiar with our modern-day understanding of feminism; nevertheless, Lady Mitter is “a woman warrior who stands up to patriarchal and imperial abuse.”
Dr. Johansen is originally from Canada and moved to Texas and Texas A&M just over twelve years ago. She misses the cooler weather, but she enjoys the availability of enchiladas verdes.
Lately she’s been reading Luster by Raven Leilani and Future Feeling by Joss Lake. Her favorite genre is romance, but she happily reads all genres of fiction and creative nonfiction. Dr. Johansen writes in order to engage with interesting ideas—from herself, authors, scholars, students—and to think more clearly about the subject. She is especially interested in the way literature and culture work and connect to social issues and values. Writing allows her to “crystallize [her] thinking about the topics that matter most.”
Dr. Johansen’s first book, Cosmopolitanism and Place, is actually what inspired her latest book, Beyond Safety. Her first book discussed cosmopolitanism and “how a deliberately or self-consciously globally-oriented view of our solidarities shapes our understanding of the physical places we inhabit.” During her research, she discovered that cosmopolitanism envisions a “safer” world that is not available to the global population; thus, Dr. Johansen wondered “what it would mean to consider the experience of being at risk as being, in fact, the more cosmopolitan experience.”
Beyond Safety was published in October 2021. The book examines risk, safety, and how human beings see themselves in relation to global existence. Dr. Johansen states that “we’re asked consistently to take risks—to think creatively, to invest in new ventures—but, paradoxically, also to always protect ourselves from risks and prioritize personal safety—from, say, violence and infection, as we’ve all been particularly aware of over the last eighteen months. Yet at the same time, so many of the things that make us safe are dependent upon other people, both far away and nearby, being made substantially less safe in a whole variety of ways. How we understand risk and safety, then, has implications for how understand ourselves as global citizens.”
Dr. Johansen’s book discusses three main points: cosmopolitanism, precarity, and neoliberalism. Cosmopolitanism is the primary view of oneself as a “citizen of the world, rather than a particular nation, state, or locality.” This means that cosmopolitans focus on global effects, not personal or small-scale effects. She explains that “precarity is a term that refers to the uneven distribution of vulnerability. By virtue of our humanity, we’re all precarious, but precarity names situations where some people are more vulnerable than others.” Finally, she defines neoliberalism as “an economic and social doctrine that understands freedom to be most likely to be guaranteed by the market,” meaning that all decisions should be viewed as financial decisions.
Many English Aggies are aspiring writers, and these successful professionals have plenty of advice. The first and most important piece of advice from all these is simple—read!
Dr. Harris encourages students to read for the plot but also to observe the way in which the work is written. He insists that students “compose the stories that trouble and thrill your soul and revise your work relentlessly.” After taking that wise advice, students have access to many avenues to share their writing, from English classes to creative writing clubs.
Dr. Bhattacharya instructs students to read in order to do research. She hopes students will follow in her footsteps and “write what [they] didn't know, and [their] own wonder at discoveries will show in [their] writing.” Her second piece of advice is to draw connections within their writing. She reminds students that “history is a multilayered and multi-veined tangle of public and private, structure and events… take detours and find yourself making unexpected discoveries that become clues, connections and templates.” Lastly, she encourages students to persevere. Despite everything, continue to write!
Dr. Johansen stresses the importance of reading and practice. Like Dr. Harris, she instructs students to “pay attention to how authors—of both fiction and non-fiction—get their point across.” Like Dr. Bhattacharya, she also encourages perseverance. The most important thing for aspiring writers to remember is that “writing—like everything—only improves when we work on it consistently.”
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