Office Location
360 Dr. Martin L. King Blvd.
Hill Hall 516
Newark, New Jersey 07102
Manu Samriti Chander is the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell, 2017) and co-editor, with Tricia A. Matthew, of the Oxford University Press book series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. His second monograph, Browntology (SUNY Press, under contract) considers the philosophical groundings of brownness in Enlightenment European thought in order to show how the figure of the model minority haunts foundational efforts to define the human. Chander is also currently editing the Fulbright- and NEH-funded Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford UP) and The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP, 2024).
Recent and forthcoming talks include the Republic of Guyana Distinguished Lecture in Georgetown, Guyana; the Kane Lecture at Ohio State; and keynotes and plenaries at the annual meetings of the International Conference on Romanticism, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and British Association for Romantic Studies.
Professor Chander serves as the department's union representative and Newark Chapter President of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT. He is a founding member of The Bigger 6 Collective, formed in 2017 to challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism.
Courses Taught
- Senses of Brown
- The Romantic Period
- Romanticism and the Politics of the Aesthetic
- The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Nation and Empire
- Global Romanticism
- Introduction to Global Literatures
- Cosmopolitanism
- Literature and Controversy
- Foundations of Literary Study
- Introduction to Graduate Literary Study
Subjects
- Literatures and Cultures of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- Race and Empire
- Poetry and Poetics
Awards
- National Endowment for the Humanities Award for Faculty, 2022
- Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium Teaching Fellowship, 2022
- New England Board of Higher Education Open Educational Resources Grant, 2021
- Open Access Textbook Faculty Grant, Rutgers University Libraries, 2021
- MLA Humanities in Five Public Engagement Prize, 2019
- Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant, 2018-2019
- Antronette Yancey Memorial Scholarship, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, 2017
- Center for Cultural Analysis Fellowship, Rutgers University, 2016-2017
- Rutgers University Research Council Grant, 2013-2015
Education
- Ph.D. Brown University, English, May 2009
- A.M. Brown University, English, May 2003
- M.F.A. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Creative Writing, May 2001
- B.A. Wesleyan University, English, May 1999
Publications
Books
- Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Buckell University Press, 2017; paperback 2019)
- Egbert Martin: Scriptology, edited (Caribbean Press, 2014)
Selected Articles
- “Reading Indigeneity in Nineteenth-Century British Guiana,” in Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis, ed. Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the British Southern Colonies (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2021), 346-57
- “Romantic Diversitarianism: Problems and Promises,” European Romantic Review 31:3 (2020), 295-300
- “Cousin Theory: Brown Kinship and Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel,” co-authored with Joseph Pierce, Victorian Studies Vol 62.3 (Spring 2020), 474-85
- “Romanticism and Metonymic Decolonization,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33:1 (2020), 99-101
- “Introduction: Abolitionist Interruptions: Romanticism, Slavery, and Genre,” co-authored with Patricia A. Matthew, in Manu Samriti Chander and Patricia A. Matthew, ed. “Romantic Genres of British Abolitionist Literature,” special issue of European Romantic Review 29.4 (2018), 431-4
- “The First Indian Poet in English: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio,” Rosinka Chaudhury, ed. The Cambridge History of Indian Poetry in English (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016), 21-31
- “Art Fights: The Persistence of Controversy in Modern Aesthetics,” Richard Howells, Andreea Ritivoi, and Judith Schachter, ed. Outrage! Art, Controversy, and Society (London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012), 293-302
- “Framing Difference: The Orientalist Aesthetics of David Roberts and Percy Shelley,” Keats-Shelley Journal 60 (2011): 77-94
- “Romantic Controversialism and the Universalist Vision of ‘Fears in Solitude,’” Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 34 (Winter 2009): 9-16
- “Contention and Contestation: Aesthetic Culture in Kant and Bourdieu,” Rei Terada, ed. Philosophy and Culture (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, June 2008)
Selected Public Writing
- "The Poetics of Abolition," Public Books, March 16, 2021
- "The Brown List," The Rambling, February 13, 2021
- "The Karma of Brown Folk at 22," Avidly, August 3, 2020
- “Oh My God, I Think America’s Racist,” V21: Victorian Studies for the 21st Century Presentist Pedagogy Series