Radhika Koul, Ph.D.

Radhika Koul joins the Literature Department as Assistant Professor of Literature and Mellon Emerging Scholar. She comes to Claremont from Stanford, where she was a Next Generation Scholars Fellow and a Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, 2021-2023. Koul’s research and teaching probe the way literature and philosophy from South Asia emerge into conversations governed by an implicit Western logic: whether cognitive aesthetics, literary criticism or education itself. To that end, she is working on a book manuscript entitled Re-cognitions: Spectating Theater, Self and World in Medieval Kashmir and Early Modern Europe. Much of Koul’s recent work has been interdisciplinary, straddling contemporary research in neuroscience and artificial intelligence with the age-old study of how literature works on the human mind. In 2022-23, she was a Graduate Fellow with Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). Koul earned her BA in Literature from Yale and two graduate degrees from Stanford: a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and an M.S. in Symbolic Systems, otherwise known as cognitive science.