SUNIL AGNANI
Assistant Professor of History and English
Email: sagnani1@uic.edu
curriculum vitae (pdf)
personal website
I hold a joint appointment with the Department of
English and the Department of
History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and teach courses on the European Enlightenment, eighteenth-century British and French literature and thought, and on the literature of empire and decolonization. I’ve finished a book,
Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (Fordham University Press, April 2013), which reads the literature of the Enlightenment in relation to debates in postcolonial thought. Recent publications include: an essay on the idea of consensual colonialism in thought of Denis Diderot entitled “Doux commerce, douce colonisation” in
The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford UP, 2007); an examination of Edmund Burke’s writings on France in relation to his involvement in Indian affairs, “Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament” (
Cultural Critique, Winter 2008); and “India and Haiti as Colonial Spaces of the Enlightenment” in
L’Inde des Lumières; Entre l’orientalisme et les sciences sociales (
Purushartha 31, École des Hautes Études Press, April 2013).