Senior Research Fellow, Lecturer in English Literature and Language
Setara Pracha was the first Ondaatje Scholar at Massey College, University of Toronto, where she specialised in postcolonial studies for her Master’s degree. Since taking up her lectureship in the English and Digital Media Department at Buckingham, she has taught across a wide range of modules and she now supervises a variety of postgraduate projects. Her research interests focus on difference: the writing of gender, diasporic literature, and twentieth-century literature reflecting the complexity, comedy, and cross-cultural fertilisation of Hybridity. Her writing features in ‘Diaspora and Cultural Negotiations: The Films of Gurinder Chadha‘ and ‘Diaspora Poetics and Homing in South Asian Women’s Writing: Beyond Trishanku‘. Her second area of research interest is literature by South Asian British immigrants and she has published articles on Moniza Alvi, Gurindha Chadha and Meera Syal. Before entering academe, she worked in retail, PR, and publishing. Her book of round-breaking research entitled The Pathology of Desire in Daphne du Maurier’s Short Stories was published by Lexington in 2023.
Qualifications
- BA (Hons) in English Literature, University of Buckingham
- MA, University of Toronto, Ondaatje Fellow
- CELTA (Oxford)
- Fellow of the HEA
- DPhil, University of Buckingham
Teaching Expertise
- Literature and Gender
- Diasporic Literature
- 20th-century Literature
- Postgraduate supervision
‘Moral Injury, Moral Agency, and Moral Repair in Carol Ann Duffy’s Feminine Gospels and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments’; ‘Yearning to Breathe Free’: ‘Surviving Jacques Derrida’s Hospitality in African-American Women’s Slave and Neo-Slave Narratives’; ‘The Politics of Waṭan: Exile Within, Resistance, and the Estranged Home Space in Twenty-First Century Arab Protest Novels’; ‘I write because I have to’: Postcolonial Pedagogy in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Literary Activism’; ‘Ghostly Sisterhood: The Supernatural Fiction of Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton and May Sinclair in an Age of Transition (1886 – 1926)’; ‘A Comparative Analysis of Circe and Medusa in Ovid and Homer, from Miller to Hewlitt’
Research Interests
- The transgressive in 20th-century fiction
- Daphne du Maurier
- Literature by, and reflecting the experience of, second-generation British immigrants
Contact Details
- Tel: +44 (0)1280 820273, setara.pracha@buckingham.ac.uk
Selected Publications
- ‘Moving on from Manderley: Daphne du Maurier’s Short Stories’ in vol 11.4, Special Issue MRC@50 of Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal (Warwick, IAS University of Warwick: 2024)
- ‘“Kiss Me Again, Stranger”: Daphne du Maurier and the Danse Macabre’ in The Graveyard in Literature:
Liminality and Social Critique (Cambridge Scholars, CUP: 2024) - Setara Pracha, The Pathology of Desire in Daphne du Maurier’s Short Stories (15 Jan 2023)
- Setara Pracha, “Apples and pears: Symbolism and influence in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Apple Tree’ and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ “, in C. Hanson, G. Kimber & W.T. Martin (eds), Katherine Mansfield and Psychology (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)