Ash Jayamohan

Thesis title: Queer Modernism and the Grasp

Biography

Background

I have degrees in English literature from Stella Maris College, University of Madras (B.A.) and the University of Edinburgh (M.Sc.). I worked briefly in publishing and feminist research in New Delhi before returning to Edinburgh to begin my doctoral studies, supported by the University's Global Research Scholarship.

Alongside my Ph.D., I have worked on student engagement research, curriculum development, and EDI initiatives in higher education. 

Responsibilities & affiliations

I was a Reader for the James Tait Black Prize in Biography (2021-23).

I served as Editor-in-Chief (2022–23) and Deputy Editor (2021-22) at FORUM Journal. Based at the LLC, FORUM is the University's open-access and peer-reviewed postgraduate journal for culture and the arts.

I am a member of the stellar Edinburgh Life Writing Network.

Undergraduate teaching

  • Introduction to Queer Studies (ECA, 2020–23)
  • Literary Studies 1B (LLC, 2021–22)

Research summary

My doctoral project on queer modernism explores the everyday gesture of the 'grasp'. In my close readings of D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Aubrey Menen, the gesture of the grasp (of seizing upon something, like an idea, a lover, or a child) insists on the strong comforts of knowability over the possibilities of opacity. I demonstrate, to this end, how queerer pressures of knowing are able to defuse this grasp in my chosen texts, if only ever provisionally, such that the grasp is flirted with in Lawrence, shared in Forster, and a matter of lo(o)sing in Menen. I offer these contested encounters of tactile knowing, ultimately, to draw attention to 'sexuality': not as identity, but as the uncertain pleasures of our inter-dependence. 

For my study of the grasp, I draw on queer theory and psychoanalysis after Jean Laplanche.

Project activity

I was the co-organiser of Fin de Sexe?: A Symposium on Sexuality (2024), funded by the University of Edinburgh's Student Experiences Grant.

I was the co-editor of Scrap Lines (2021), a creative zine on marginalised knowledges ('queer trash'), also funded by the Student Experiences Grant.

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