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Dr Nisha Ramayya, BA, MA, DPhil (RHUL)

Nisha

Senior Lecturer In Creative Writing

Email: n.ramayya@qmul.ac.uk
Website: http://www.nisharamayya.com

Profile

I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, making annual trips to Hyderabad, India, and moved down south to study a BA in English and an MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London. I returned to Glasgow for a few wonderfully warm and profoundly formative years working at Glasgow Women’s Library, after which I moved to London (where I remain!) for a Practice-Based Research PhD at RHUL. My doctoral research focussed on experimental feminist poetics, surveying a historically and formally wide range of writers and artists, and I experimented with Sanskrit, Tantra, and British-Indian history, identity, and experience in the process. I love to think about poetry in an ever-expanding sense, to include a multitude of theoretical, disciplinary, and formal approaches. 

 

Teaching

  • CW1: Introduction to Creative Writing 
  • CW2: Poetry and Performance 
  • CW3: the Poetics of Translation 
  • CW3: Dissertation 
  • MA: Collaborative Practices 

Research

Research Interests:

I am committed to interdisciplinary and collaborative projects, and my work includes poetry, performance, creative-critical writing, essays, reviews, and scholarly articles, as well as teaching and organising events within and beyond the university.  

Publications

Fantasia (Granta Books, 2024)

Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane’s experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth. 

 

States of the Body Produced by Love (Spiral House Editions, 2025)

A modern mystical journey through love – a many-headed snake twisting through devotion, sacrifice and the dream of returning home. 

In her visionary debut, Nisha Ramayya conjures an opalescent world by way of Tantric ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems.  

With a new Afterword, including a story by Bhanu Kapil, States of the Body Produced By Love weaves essays, poetry and images together to offer fierce meditations on diasporic identity, language and resistance. From grief to bliss, this book explores the many states of the body seized by love in an incantation that never leaves its hold.  

 

Siblings (Monitor Books, 2024)

Convened by Will Harris, Siblings is a roundtable conversation between four poets on writing communities, real and imaginary siblings, and first encounters with poetry. 

Thinking through the lyric mode’s wayward directions — speaking sideways to peers and siblings, writing vertically to parentage, lineage, literary histories — these four poets talk to each other as makers and friends about the possibilities that poetry enables now. 

 

Threads (clinic press, 2018) by Sandeep Parmar, Bhanu Kapil, and Nisha Ramayya 

“Who occupies the “I” in poetry? When poets write, are they personally embodying their speakers or are they intended to be emblematic of something larger and more complex? Is the “I” assumed to be immutable or is it more porous? These are the questions posited in Threads, which illuminates the function of the lyric “I” in relation to whiteness, maleness and Britishness. Its short but acute essays interrogate whiteness’s hegemony in literature and language, revealing how writers from outside the dominant paradigm are often made to reckon with the positions and perspectives they write from.” Anthony Anaxagorou (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/14/top-10-books-about-creative-writing)

 

Some Links:

 

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.

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