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Aliya Ram

By Marta Wallien

Biography

Aliya Ram is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA. Her research focuses on the relationships between social coercion and aesthetic innovation in comparative contexts. She is currently working on two book projects: the first on literary address, and the second on the emergence of the refugee as an exemplary narrator. The first, tentatively titled Rethinking Literary Address, is based on her prize-winning doctoral dissertation and studies of the ethical, political, and philosophical implications of address beyond the canon of lyric poetry where it has typically been discussed. The second builds on research into performative language, particularly the operations of opacity, ambiguity, and misdirection, to argue that the shift from statelessness to persecution as the definitional characteristic of the refugee in 1951 raises questions of narrative credibility, social identity, cultural difference, styles of storytelling, and legal audience that can only be answered using the tools of literary analysis. Aliya works primarily with materials in English, Hindi, Urdu, and French from South Asia, the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States. She also reads Spanish and Chinese and takes a global, multilingual, and comparative approach to her research.

Aliya joins UCLA from Cambridge, where she held a Junior Research Fellowship at Peterhouse. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature, with a joint degree in the Interdisciplinary Humanities, from Princeton University in May 2025. Prior to graduate school, she worked for five years as a news reporter at the Financial Times, where her writing on technology was shortlisted for the British Press Awards and the British Journalism Awards. She has published translations and on translation and also writes fiction and poetry that is represented by the Creative Artists Agency in London.

Education

  • B.A. (Hons) English Literature, University of Cambridge, Gonville & Caius College
  • Ph.D. Comparative Literature and the Interdisciplinary Humanities, Princeton University
   

Publications

Ram, Aliya and Meher Ali, eds. Horizontal Translation: An Experiment with South Asian Literature. Bloomsbury Academic: Literatures, Cultures, Translation series. Under contract.

Ram, Aliya, “Banyan Productions, Derek Walcott, and the Making of The Rig.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Forthcoming.

Ram, Aliya. Review of Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, by Jason Allen-Paisant. Modernism/modernity 33, no. 1 (2026): 179-181.Link.

Ram, Aliya. “Qui et quels nous sommes? The Poetics of Address in Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants.” English Literary History 92, no. 1 (2025): 33-64. Link.

Ram, Aliya, trans. Decolonial Pluriversalism, eds. Zahra Ali and Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). Link.

Ram, Aliya. Review of The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method, by Preetha Mani. Comparative Literature Studies 60, no. 3 (2023): 610-613. Link.

Ram, Aliya. Review of The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan. Critical Inquiry 49.1 (Autumn 2022): 137-138. Link.