Deepshikha Behera

Dr. Deepshikha Behera is an IASH Digital Research Postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She is a project collaborator at the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre, University of Oxford. Deepshikha received her doctorate from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She holds a Masters degree from Miranda House, University of Delhi. She has previously taught at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad as a Guest Faculty. 

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Her research engages with untranslatability as a method to study plural language-cultures in multilingual societies and understands the ethical concerns of translating difference through comparative poetics and ethnographic engagement. She is interested in looking at critical discursive categories such as migration and citizenship through the framework of translation and untranslatability. She is equally invested in understanding the theory-praxis gap in ethnographic field-work and methods of oral history and its intervention into the idea of language as a relational phenomena. 

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Her postdoctoral project focuses on the interplay of oral and digital in the study of ‘low-resource’ languages within Generative AI models with a focus on Decoloniality. As a member of the Creativity, AI, and the Human cluster at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, she engages with questions of creativity and AI ethics and the changing contours of literariness among speakers of oral language-cultures in the age of digital.

 

She also serves as an Executive Committee Member for the Oral History Association of India and is a member of the International Comparative Literature Association's (ICLA) Research Development Committee. She has published in several peer reviewed journals such as Asian Ethnicity and Jadavpur Journal for Comparative Literature. 

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As one of the founding members of Comparatists in Conversation, she looks forward to connecting with a broad network of researchers and hopes that this is the beginning of many new collaborations and conversations and interdisciplinary exchanges.