Anirudh Sridhar

Dr Anirudh Sridhar received a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2020. His PhD thesis at the University of Oxford received the highest honours reserved for the thesis in the humanities and was recommended for publication with the Oxford University Press. He holds a Master of Arts from the University of Freiburg, Germany, and a Bachelor of Science from the State University of New York-ESF, USA.

Dr Sridhar is the co-editor and co-author with Derek Attridge of ‘The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the Twenty-First Century’, a polemical intervention that argues against certain methodological trends in the humanities and for the rehabilitation of close reading. The book was #1 on the Amazon new bestseller list in literary theory for June 2021.

Dr Sridhar’s interdisciplinary approach to the humanities with his studies in environmental law and marine biology brings scientific, legal, historical, and philosophical perspectives into literary studies. Apart from this, he has taught many interdisciplinary courses at the Universities of Freiburg and Oxford in British and American philosophy and literature. Some of his notable publications are ‘The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the Twenty-First Century’, ‘Agon: Poetry’s Defence against the Mathematization of Reality’ and ‘John Ruskin and Karl Marx: Competing philosophies of “labour”.