Biography

Dr. Aishwarya Subramanian is an Associate Professor at Jindal Global Law School. She holds a B.A. (Hons) in English from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, an M. Phil from Trinity College Dublin, and a PhD from Newcastle University in the UK. Prior to her PhD, she worked for some years in children’s academic publishing. Her research interests encompass popular children’s literature, science fiction and fantasy, theories of spatiality and borders, and nationalisms after empire. Some of her publications include papers on prize culture (International Research in Children’s Literature, 2019), aerial surveillance in fantasy (Space and Culture, 2020), board games and empire (Jeunesse, 2020), the space of the museum in British children’s literature (The Lion & the Unicorn, 2021) and the spatial politics of Delhi as represented in recent speculative fiction (Comparative Critical Studies, 2021 and SFRA Review, 2023). Her recent book, Please Look After This Bear: How Paddington Became British (Oxford University Press 2026), co-authored with Professor Melanie Ramdarshan Bold (Glasgow University), traces the place within British popular culture of an iconic children’s literary character and locates it within changing discourses of immigration, belonging and national identity.  In 2018 she was awarded a Creative Economy Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for “Networked Voices”, a project mapping the history of anti-racist activism within the children’s literature community. The project was based within the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, alongside Seven Stories, the National Archive of Children’s Literature. She had previously worked at Newcastle University as a teaching assistant and instructor. In 2019 she was a recipient of a Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) International Honor Award.  As a scholar of popular culture, Dr. Subramanian’s work of necessity straddles academic and non-academic spaces. In 2022-2023, she was one of four academic respondents for “Future Voices of Science Fiction and Fantasy”, an AHRC-funded project hosted jointly by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow, Staffordshire University, and the Glasgow 2024 World Science Fiction Convention. She has been an invited guest speaker at the Arthur Ransome Society Weekend and at the English Heritage property Marble Hill House. From 2008-2018, Dr Subramanian had worked as a literary columnist and critic, writing on literature and film for a number of mainstream and genre publications. In keeping with her interest in Science Fiction, she has served as a juror for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (2013) and A.C. Bose Grant (2019), and currently serves on the editorial board of Gold SF, Goldsmiths University’s science fiction publishing imprint.  She has also been a reviews editor for Strange Horizons, an award-winning magazine of speculative fiction, since 2015.

Dr. Subramanian’s research interests encompass genre fiction, particularly science-fiction and fantasy, and children’s literature and culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries with a particular focus on the mid- to late- twentieth century.