Devika Sharma

Devika Sharma

Lektor

Ph.D., University of Copenhagen, 2008

MA, New York University, 2003

MA (KA), University of Copenhagen, 2003

Research Interests: Cultural Studies | Critical Theory | Feminist Studies | Media & Conflict | Critical Humanitarianism Studies | Contemporary Scandinavian Culture

Devika Sharma is associate professor of Modern Culture at UCPH, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies. Her first book, Amerikanske fængselsbilleder (American Prison Imagery, Tiderne Skifter, 2011) discussed contemporary North American “prison culture” through an analysis of the prison as motif in contemporary art, literary fiction, cinema, and popular culture with a special emphasis on questions of innocence, racial difference, animality, and, more broadly, the US prison system as a regime that cannot adequately be understood within the familiar conceptual framework of “disciplinary institutions”. Her second book (in review) explores a historical sensibility of privilege central to contemporary Scandinavian cultural life: a shared sense of living off economically and politically exploitative systems and their histories. This sensibility, the book argues, has gained relevance in twenty-first-century Scandinavian societies where the postwar ‘Nordic model’ of the welfare state has fostered a popular egalitarian imaginary.

Sharma’s work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of cultural objects in order to identify and name the affective claims, moral-political stakes, aesthetic forms, and theoretical dilemmas called up by contemporary issues of social injustice and inequality as they relate to global class structures, gender, and race.

Devika Sharma is an editor of the journal K&K, Kultur og Klasse, for which she has co-edited special issues on affect studies, cultural critique, Scandinavian forms of shame and guilt, and sentimental cultures. She is the co-editor (with Frederik Tygstrup) of Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture (De Gruyter, 2015). Sharma is currently Ph.D. Coordinator at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies.

Devika Sharma teaches BA and MA course modules in cultural theory and cultural analysis.

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