Vijay Chandra Mishra (born 4 May 1945) is an academic, author and cultural theorist from Fiji. He is currently a professor at Murdoch University, Australia.
Academic and professional career
Born in Suva, Fiji on 4 May 1945 to Hari Mishra and Lila Mishra, Vijay was educated at Lelean Memorial School where he completed his Senior Cambridge Higher School Certificate in the First Division. Following this he did his New Zealand University Entrance Examination at Suva Grammar School where he won both the Arts and the History Prize. A British colonial scholarship took him to Victoria University of Wellington and to Christchurch Teachers’ College from which institutions he gained, respectively, a B.A. and a Diploma in Teaching.
After a brief teaching stint at Labasa College in Fiji from 1968 to 1969, Vijay went to Macquarie University on a Commonwealth Scholarship where he completed Masters papers in Linguistics and a B.A. with First Class Honours in English Literature. A further brief career in Fiji, this time as a Senior Education Officer, was followed by migration to Australia in 1974. By then he was married to Nalini Singh, daughter of Pratap and Damiyanti Singh.
In Australia he completed a Masters in English literature at Sydney University and then, in 1976, joined the newly established Murdoch University in Perth, as a tutor in World Literature. He left the university in early 1978 to undertake a PhD in Medieval Indian Poetry and Aesthetics at the Australian National University which he gained in 1981.
He returned to Murdoch University as a lecturer in Comparative Literature but three years later left for Oxford University to complete his DPhil in English Literature, graduating in 1989. After holding the position of professor of English Literature at the University of Alberta in Canada, Mishra has been the professor of English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University since 1999. Between 2010 and 2015 he was an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. He has also held visiting professorships at the University of Wales, the University of California, the University of Otago, Universitat des Saarlandes.,[1] University of Technology, Sydney, and the Australian National University.[2] In 2015, he was the Erich Auerbach Professor of Global Literature at the University of Tübingen.[3] For the period of 2017-2019, he was elected Visiting Fellow, University of Tulsa to work in the V. S. Naipaul Archive deposited in the university's McFarlin Library.
Selected bibliography
Books
Hodge, Bob; Mishra, Vijay (1991). Dark side of the dream : Australian literature and the postcolonial mind. North Sydney, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin. ISBN9780044423461. OCLC52729255.
Vijay., Mishra (1994). The gothic sublime. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN9780791417478. OCLC42855471.
Vijay., Mishra (1998). Devotional poetics and the Indian sublime. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN9780791438718. OCLC44960022.
Vijay., Mishra (2006). Bollywood cinema : a critical genealogy. Victoria University of Wellington. Asian Studies Institute. Wellington, N.Z.: Asian Studies Institute. ISBN9780473116217. OCLC153210452.
Vijay., Mishra (2007). Literature of the Indian diaspora : theorizing the diasporic imaginary (1. publ ed.). London [u.a.]: Routledge. ISBN9780415759694. OCLC219524348.
Vijay., Mishra (2012). What was multiculturalism? : a critical retrospect. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing. ISBN9780522861273. OCLC772644579.
Vijay Mishra is a multidisciplinary scholar whose works are cited by scholars working in film studies, classical Indian studies, literary and cultural theories, religious studies, English literature including post colonial, diaspora and Australian literatures.[4] His books have been reviewed and critically acclaimed by scholars worldwide[5][6][7]
^Gitomer, David L. (1 June 2000). "Reviewed Work:Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime by Vijay Mishra". Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 68 (2): 428–431. doi:10.1093/jaarel/68.2.428. ISSN0002-7189. JSTOR1465947. Though many Indologists have deepened their studies of literature under the influence of western aesthetic theory and postmodern approaches to critical reading, it has fallen to a professor of English to produce the first comprehensive work on South Asian religious poetry that fully cognizes European aesthetic theory.
^Fox, Alistair (2007). "In Search of Genuine Equality: The Problem with Multiculturalism". Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 16 (3): 423–430. doi:10.1353/dsp.2007.0024. ISSN1911-1568. S2CID142885812. Mishra's analysis is...not only providing the most penetrating analysis yet published of the array of different approaches to the "multicultural riddle," but also proposing implicitly along the way, and explicitly in its conclusion, a radically reconceived, alternative form of multiculturalism as the desirable way forward for societies aiming to achieve justice for all citizens in terms that allow none of them to feel marginalized or alienated.
^Paranjape, Makarand (1 January 2009). "Vijay Mishra. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary". ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. 40 (1). ISSN1920-1222. ...this remarkable book, which I venture to say is possibly the best work so far on the literature of the Indian diaspora...[Mishra] hasmade a more lasting and substantial contribution to our shared narratives and pasts than anyone I know in the home country.
