Media Release
Mangalore, Sep 10: Sylvia Rego, associate professor from the Department of English, St Aloysius College (Autonomous), Mangalore, has been teaching for the past 22 years.
She is a resident of Urwa Parish, her area of specialization and interest lies in the multi-disciplinary domain of Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, Literary Theory and Indian Writing in English and Translation.
She has presented many papers at National and International Seminars and Conferences, and published several articles in research journals.
She has been awarded a PhD by Mangalore University for her thesis entitled ‘Indian Women Autobiographers of the Nationalist Period – A Gender Analysis’.
She was guided by professor Kishori Nayak K, chair person of English Dept,Mangalore University . It is an exploration of the multiple ways in which women who dared to take up the pen through their autobiographical writings constructed and fashioned their narrative selves against the backdrop of the emerging nationalism in the late nineteenth and early century Maharashtra.
The entwining discourses of patriarchy, caste, evangelism and nationalism that influenced the lives and writings of women are analysed here to trace the emergence of a proto-feminist consciousness therein.
The sculpting of the ‘New Woman’ in response to the denigration of natives by the colonial regime was simultaneously used by these women to craft their own personhood, or rather, to ‘imagine’ it through a narrativisation of their lives by indigenising the genre of autobiography.
They use various strategies to encode complex and submerged meanings that can be read as ‘performative’.