Announcing new co-editors and deputy editor of C21: Literature
Posted by Katie da Cunha Lewin on 2025-07-18
We are delighted to announce that Katie da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward have been appointed to the Editorship of C21 Literature and that Sunayani Bhattacharya has been appointed to the Deputy Editor Team. Thanks to Dr Caroline Edwards and Professor Sîan Adiseshiah for their stalwart steering of C21 these last three years, and to the many deputy editors past and present.
Katie Da Cunha Lewin is a writer and lecturer. She has written extensively on Don DeLillo, and was the co-editor, with Kiron, of Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2018). She has also written on millennial novelists and writing labour. Her reviews and essays have been published widely, and she is the author of The Writer’s Room (Elliott & Thompson, 2025).
Kiron Ward is currently based at the University of St Andrews; he is the author of Encyclopaedism and Totality in Contemporary Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2025), and has co-edited publications on Don DeLillo (with Katie) and on James Joyce (with James Blackwell Phelan for JJQ and E. Paige Miller for Textual Practice).
From Katie and Kiron:
As long-time collaborators, we are excited to start a new chapter of C21 together. In a moment of disquiet for so many of us in Higher Education, and in the various crises we see in the academy across the globe, the work of collaboration and co-operation has never felt more crucial, not just in the undertaking of teaching or the production of scholarship, but in the very formation of ideas. We commence our work at this journal on the principal that thinking is never done alone; we hope to evidence this across the articles, special issues, interviews, reviews, and roundtables that we publish over the next three years.
Our role as editors is to champion the insightful and varied work of contemporary literature scholars regardless of career stage or institutional affiliation. We are excited to work with an Open Access journal, supported by Open Library of the Humanities, and are committed to the myriad benefits that this brings to individuals as well as the wider academic community. As part of our editorship, we look forward to welcoming contributions from more scholars interested in publishing their work in this way, and particularly to working with doctoral and Early Career scholars.
Sunayani Bhattacharya is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Saint Mary's College of California. Her research investigates practices of reading and listening in the Global South in the context of emergent media. She is the author of The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal: Becoming Readers in Colonial India (Bloomsbury, 2023) which studies the ways in which Bengalis thought about, and fashioned practices of reading. She is currently working on her second monograph For Your Ears Only: All India Radio and Bengali Popular Prose focuses on the media ecosystem created by radio listeners, performers, and popular writers in 20th century Bengal. As part of this project, she is also engaged in creating a scholarly digital edition of Betar Jagat, the mouthpiece of All India Radio in Bengal. Sunayani's work connects the 19th to the 21st century as she locates in both practices of perception engendered by the lived experiences of individuals who find traces of the past enmeshed with the present.
From Sunayani:
As a comparatist, I am particularly drawn to C21 Literature’s investment in approaches that cross national, generic, and academic boundaries, and its willingness to publish works by scholars from both the Global South and the North. I see reflected in the journal’s vision those qualities of scholarship on the 21st-century that have drawn me to this field of research—a critical theorization of the term “contemporary” in and through literary productions of the current moment, alongside a robust engagement with the limits of the literary itself. I am especially excited to bring to bear my experience in working with digital cultural records to develop a vision for C21 Literature that builds on this investment in accessible scholarship, and situates the journal at the juncture of postcolonial digital humanities and critical infrastructure studies. Such an approach, I believe, will continue the stellar work done by the journal in its investigation of contemporary literature, while expanding its scope to include discussions on changing notions of readership, fostering and sustaining digital texts, and the material culture subtending literary productions.
Keep an eye on the C21 website for news, CfPs, and events in the future.