Literature | The World of Romeo and Juliet

Madhavi Menon is an eminent theorist and scholar of gender, sexuality, politics, and identity. She joined Ashoka University in 2013 as one of its founding faculty members. She went on to establish the university’s Centre for Gender & Sexuality Studies (CSGS), which is the first of its kind in India. Previously, she was a professor at Ithaca College and American University. Most prominently known for her work on queer theory and Shakespeare, she has also edited the collection Shakesqueer and written three books on Shakespeare and sexuality. She is also most recently the author of Infinite Varieties: A History of Desire in India and Law of Desire: Rulings on Sex & Sexuality in India. In addition to being Director of CSGS, she is the Director of the Ph.D. programme in English and Professor of English at Ashoka University.

Shivangi Jalan is a PhD student at the English Department at Ashoka University. She is interested in studying film and queer theory. She is interested in questions of spectatorship, identification and sexuality as seen through and on the screen. She completed her Masters in Liberal Studies with a concentration in English Literature from Ashoka University in the year 2020. For her Master’s thesis, she worked on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat and her thesis was titled “Filmic Polysemy: The Many Meanings of Padmaavat.” It argues against the finality of a reading of a film, specifically Padmaavat, and attempts to read queerness in the visual metaphors of the film. She completed the Young India Fellowship in the year 2018. After that, she also worked as a Teaching Fellow in the English Department for the Foundation Course called Great Books.