Meghna Sapui

My research focuses on the literature and culture of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My first book, Edible Empire: Tasting and Writing India, looks at alimentary narratives in the literatures of British India. I show how food is used to tell stories that are often inappropriate, impermissible, and difficult to tell under colonial regimes. Drawing on the interdisciplinarity of food studies, my work charts narratives of caste, ecology, and race as they are mediated through gustation in various colonial genres. As gustation becomes the dominant rhetoric of empire, variously registered as hunger, greed, predation, and desire, Edible Empire analyzes how a bodily practice becomes a potent trope that runs amok—telling stories of empire that subvert dominant political ideologies and historical forms of power. More broadly, I am interested in how nineteenth-century understandings of gustation and its narrative uses continue to influence the volatile edibility politics of present-day South Asia. I am also working on my next project which looks at the imperial formations of ecological disciplines.

My teaching and pedagogy draw on my research while also being shaped by my broader interests in gender studies, food studies, popular culture, and colonial and anticolonial literature and theory. I teach classes on the nineteenth century, food studies, literatures of the British empire, postcolonial literature, affect, and genre. 

Publications:

•  “Domesticating Disgust: Food, Labor, and Disgust in Colonial India.” Global Food History, doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2024.2301890.
• “Eat, Write, Dramatize: Young Bengal's Gastro Drama.” ELH, vol. 90 no. 2, 2023, pp. 425-456, doi: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900601.
•  “The Culinary and the Colonial in G.F. Atkinson's Curry and Rice." Victorian Review, vol. 48 no. 2, 2022, pp. 225-248, doi: 10.1353/vcr.2022.a900625.
•   “From the Table to the Trenches: the Chapati in The Wife and the Ward.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol 50, no. 4, 2022, pp. 639-667, doi: 10.1017/S1060150321000103.
•   “Food in the Colonies.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. by Lesa Scholl, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_438-1.