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Widely acknowledged as an important literary and cultural theorist in many fields and disciplines, Professor Vijay C. Mishra was born on May 4, 1945, in Fiji, the son of Hari Mishra and Lila Mishra. He was educated at Lelean Memorial School, Fiji, where he completed his Senior Cambridge Higher School Certificate in the First Division and established a school record. Following this he did his New Zealand University Entrance Examination at Suva Grammar School where he won both the Arts and the History Prize. A British colonial scholarship took him to Victoria University of Wellington and to Christchurch Teachers’ College from which institutions he gained, respectively, a BA and a Diploma in Teaching.
After a brief teaching stint at Labasa College, Fiji (1968–69) he went to Macquarie University on a Commonwealth Scholarship where he completed Masters papers in Linguistics and a BA (with First Class Honours) in English Literature. A further brief career in Fiji, this time as a Senior Education Officer, was followed by migration to Australia in 1974. By then he was married to Nalini Singh, daughter of Pratap and Damiyanti Singh.
In Australia he completed a Masters in English literature at Sydney University and then, in 1976, joined the newly established Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia’s second university, as a Tutor in World Literature. World Literature introduced him to a different understanding of literary studies and he left Murdoch University in early 1978 to undertake a PhD in Medieval Indian Poetry and Aesthetics at the Australian National University from which institution he graduated in 1981 with a PhD.
He returned to Murdoch University as a Lecturer in Comparative Literature but three years later left for Oxford University (where in 1975 he had won a Violet Vaughan Morgan studentship in English Literature) to complete his DPhil in English Literature, graduating in 1989. With two doctorates in two different areas of literary studies, he began a rather unusual academic career as a multidisciplinary scholar whose works are cited by scholars working in film studies, diaspora studies, classical Indian studies, literary and cultural theory, religious studies, multiculturalism, as well as English literature (including postcolonial, diaspora and Australian literatures). Some of his essays and books have been foundational, with essays reprinted and sections of books anthologized. Selected reviews of his books given below indicate not only the breadth of his scholarship but also the academic value of individual works. On Dark Side of the Dream, a reviewer wrote, “This book by Hodge and Mishra is the most sophisticated attempt to date to theorise the relationship between dominant white Australian cultural modes and those of Australian Aboriginal cultures.” (Australian Literary Studies 1992: 328-332). On The Gothic Sublime we read, “So argues Vijay Mishra in this fine new book – ambitious in its purpose, wide in its range, and fairly fresh and original in its focus … and ‘thorough’ certainly seems to be the right word, as Mishra brings to his work not only splendid awareness of current theorizing about the sublime, but also that rare ability to move back to more traditional ‘aesthetic’ sources like Longinus, Boileau, John Dennis and Burke.” (Southern Humanities Review 30 (Fall 1996): 393-396). Reviewing what is, quite possibly, his most difficult book (Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime), David L. Gitomer, a world-class Sanskritist and one of the translators of the Chicago Mahābhārata began with the words: “Though many Indologists have deepened their studies of literature under the influence of western aesthetic theory and postmodern approaches to critical reading, it has fallen to a professor of English to produce the first comprehensive work on South Asian religious poetry that fully cognizes European aesthetic theory.” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68.2 (2000): 428-31). On Bollywood Cinema we read, “[His] remarkably insightful reading carries a freshness that will greatly enrich the existing literature on Indian cinema …This book is an invaluable contribution to the existing body of literature on Indian cinema. … Though a dense read … the author’s efforts to delineate critical theory, in order to make the volume accessible to the ordinary reader, are to be appreciated.”( Biblio (Sept/Oct 2002: 18)). On The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007) we read: “This remarkable book, which I venture to say is possibly the best work so far on the literature of the Indian diaspora…[Mishra] has made a more lasting and substantial contribution to our shared narratives and pasts than anyone I know in the home country.” (Ariel 40 (2009)). On What was Multiculturalism (2012) Alistair Fox wrote “[Mishra’s analysis provides] the most penetrating analysis yet published of the array of different approaches to the ‘multicultural riddle’ but also proposing … a radically reconceived, alternative form of multiculturalism” (Diaspora 16. 3). For his latest Annotating Salman Rushdie (2018) Homi Bhabha provides the following blurb: “Vijay Mishra’s courageous and careful book delves deeply into Rushdie’s echo chamber of associations and annotations and provides us with a crucial study of the postcolonial text as figured through Rushdie’s creative genius.”
Vijay C. Mishra has been the Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University since 1999. Prior to that position, he was Professor of English Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada . Between 2010 and 2015 he was an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. In 2017 he was awarded another Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to write a book on V. S. Naipaul based on the University of Tulsa Naipaul Archive. At various times he has been Professor of English Literature, University of Alberta, Canada; Senior Fellow, University of Wales; Professorial Fellow, University of California Santa Cruz; Robert Evans Fellow, University of Otago; Visiting Professor of English, Universität des Saarlandes; Professorial Fellow, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University; Christensen Professorial Fellow, St Catherine’s College, Oxford; and Erich Auerbach Professor of Global Literary Studies, University of Tübingen. Fluent in English, Hindi, Fijian and Fiji Hindi, he reads Sanskrit, Old and Middle English, French and German with unique expertise. He has been the Chair of the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards and of the S. E. Asian and Australasian Section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Vijay Mishra is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy (FAHA) and has had an entry in 'Who’s Who in Australia' since 2000.
Vijay Mishra is married to Nalini Mishra and has a son (Rohan Mishra) and a daughter (Paras Meates).
Professor Vijay Mishra (1945- )
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