Kalsang Yangzom

Name:

Profession: Assistant Professor

Location: New Delhi

Kalsang Yangzom is an M.Phil graduate from the Department of English, University of Delhi. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor in English at Indraprastha College for Women and has previously worked at Hansraj College and Shaheed Bhagat Singh College.

Kalsang’s love for reading led her to study literature as a discipline in the University of Delhi. She chose to work in academics because it not only allowed her to pursue her interests but also gave her the space to share as well as learn from others. Working in a university environment has been an extremely rewarding experience despite its rigorous demands and has made her more aware of the complex relation between knowledge, self, and power.

For her M.Phil dissertation, she worked on Tibetan Diasporic literature, written specifically in English, as a way to examine the role of these literary products in the Tibetan diasporic community. As a community that is grappling with negotiating the metropolitan world while maintaining its cultural roots, Tibetans in exile provide a critical space to question what it means to be a Tibetan in conjunct with those living inside Tibet. Such a re-articulation of ‘Tibetaness’ also helped her to rethink concepts such as nation, identity, the national language, and history etc. Opening up the category ‘Tibetan’ by interrogating literary works written in non-Tibetan languages, aides in highlighting the constructed nature of Tibetan identity and thus make space for different kinds of Tibetans exist without being burdened by the anxiety of ‘authenticity’.

Besides Tibetan literature, she also works on Diaspora Studies, Cultural Studies, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Popular Fiction, and Gender Studies. She has also presented papers on these in national and international conferences held in New Delhi and Guwahati.

She is currently living in New Delhi and hopes to soon pursue a PhD in Literature.