Research Interests: Renaissance and late-Medieval literature and culture; colonialism and post-colonialism; history of ideas; history of science; literary theory

Shankar Raman's research focuses on late medieval and early modern literature and culture, and in particular on the intersection of colonialism, science, and economics. His first book, Framing 'India': The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture, investigates the relationship between colonialism and literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. It compares Portuguese, English and Dutch colonial activity to examine the role of India as a figure through which these diverse European powers imagined and defined themselves. His interests also include the history of ideas and literary theory. He received his PhD in English Literature (with a minor in German) from Stanford University in 1995, switching fields and careers after receiving both a master's (U. C. Berkeley) and a bachelor's (MIT) degree in Electrical Engineering (along with a second bachelor's at MIT through the Department of Architecture).

He is now completing a second book on the intersection of science and the aesthetic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, tentatively entitled Untimely Meditations: Crises of Representation in Early Modern Literature and Painting. He currently participates in a major five-year interdisciplinary research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, entitled Making Publics: Media, Markets and Associations in Early Modern Europe, 1500 - 1700 [MaPs].

His teaching at MIT includes: Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry and drama, literary theory, and postcolonial fiction.

2007	"Death by Numbers: Counting and Accounting in The Winter's Tale," forthcoming in Diana Henderson ed., Alternative Shakespeares 3.
2007	"Marvell's Now," Early Modern Culture (6), Special Issue: Timely Meditations (eds. Crystal Bartolovich and Jonathan Gil Harris); http://emc.eserver.org/1-6/raman.html
2005	"Marking Time: Memory and Market in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors," Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2): 176-205.
2004	"'The Ship Comes Well-Laden': Court Politics, Colonialism, and Cuckoldry in Gil Vicente's Auto da India." In: Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations 1500-1900, ed. Balachandran Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 15-32.
2001	"Can't Buy Me Love: Money, Gender, and Colonialism in Donne's Erotic Verse." Criticism 43(2): 135-168.
2001	"Back to the Future: Forging History in Luis de Camões' Os Lusíadas," in Travel Knowledge: European "Discoveries" in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh,.New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 127-147.
1997	"Imaginary Islands: Staging the East." Renaissance Drama, n.s., Vol. XXVI: 131-162.
1997	"Desire and Violence in Renaissance England: Christopher Marlowe's Edward II." Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 71(1): 39-69.

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