Ananya Jahanara Kabir , the distinguished scholar and Professor of English literature at King’s College, London, has been chosen for the Mar Chrysostom International Visiting Fellowship for the year 2023-24. The fellowship is instituted by Mar Chrysostom Chair at Mahatma Gandhi University for the scholars of international standing to conduct a study visit to India and pursue a research on one of the thrust areas of the Chair which include Indian Christianity, Comparative Theology,
Religion and Philosophy, Secular Studies, Religion and Visual Culture, Intercultural Studies etc.

Mar Chrysostom Chair is an initiative by the Government of Kerala, established in 2022, named after the former head of the Mar Thoma Church , Philipos Mar Chrysostom , which propagates the values of humanity in different religious philosophies.

Professor Kabir received her doctoral degree in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, in 1998 and MPhil in Old English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford in 1994.She currently specialises in a variety of fields such as culture, conflict, creolisation, memory studies, South Asian literary and cultural production.

The research she wants to undertake during her tenure as Visiting Research Fellow at MGU is Creolising Christianity on the Malabar Coast: Five Centuries of Intercultural Innovation. Her recent publications include: Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (Women Unlimited, Delhi, 2013, and University Press, Dhaka, 2014), Territory of  Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Professor Kabir has been the recipient of many prestigious awards and fellowships; British Academy Senior Research Fellowship,  Humboldt Research Prize, Rockefeller Academic Residency, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Research Fellowship, Dorothy Whitelock Prize for Anglo-SaxonStudies, Radhakrishnan Scholarship, to name a few.