Eesha Kumar

Eesha Kumar works across comparative literature, philosophy and South Asian studies, with broad interests in enumeration (listing and sorting), questions of form, poetics, translation, and intellectual history. Her writing on these subjects has appeared or is forthcoming in Qui Parle, Philological Encounters, and the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, among other venues.

She recently earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University, where she held concurrent fellowships at the Center for the Humanities and the Graduate School of Arts and Science. Her dissertation, Studies in Enumerative Thinking, demonstrates the importance of enumeration for thinking in three chapters, juxtaposing materials rarely studied together: Sanskrit poetics, Ambedkar’s anti-caste writings and Aristotle’s science. For this dissertation she worked with primary materials in Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, French and English. She is currently developing a book manuscript drawing from this work, tentatively titled Consciousness of Kind.

With Adhira Mangalagiri, she is the editor of “South Asian Untranslatables,” a special issue of Philological Encounters that uses the framework of the untranslatable (following Barbara Cassin and Emily Apter) to initiate dialogue between scholars of South Asia in the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, religion, caste studies, history, aesthetics, and philosophy. It is slated for publication in late 2025.

Before moving to New York, Eesha volunteered at The Community Library Project after receiving an M.A. in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a B.A. in English from Lady Shri Ram College (Delhi University).