Educational history:
Ph.D. National University of Singapore, 2015
M.A. School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, 2009
*For the academic year 2023-24, Professor Kailasam is on research leave and will be a AIIS-NEH fellow from July 2023- January 2024.
Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Professor Kailasam was a lecturer in Tamil Studies at the South Asian Studies Programme (SASP) at the National University of Singapore from 2015 to 2019.
Research interests:
Professor Kailasam is currently working on two projects.
Professor Kailasam's first book project, Tamil Realisms: Reading the Global Tamil Novel investigates the growth and evolution of the postcolonial Tamil realist novel produced in India, Sri Lanka, and the Southeast Asian countries of Singapore and Malaysia from the 1940s to the 1980s. Tamil Realisms examines how different styles of the realist form in Tamil prose chart portrayals of a global Tamil experience in the twentieth century in ways that contest a singular understanding of South Asian realisms as being solely oriented through the anticolonial politics of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). This research has been funded by grants from The Townsend Center of the Humanities, Humanities Research Fellowship (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon grant), Hellman Society of Fellows, Bruce.R.Pray book workshop grant and an AIIS - NEH senior fellowship.
Professor Kailasam's second project, Post Millennial Tamil Visual Cultures assesses evolution of global Tamil visual narrative forms, its linkages to Tamil cultural modernity and gendered consumption patterns. Articles arising out of this study have been published in South Asian Popular Culture and Tamil Cinema in the Twenty First century: Caste, Gender and Technology.