Dr Arun Sood
Lecturer in pre-1800 Literature
English and Creative Writing
A scholar, writer, and audio-visual artist, Arun Sood is currently Principal Investigator on the UKRI AHRC Catalyst project Plants, Plantations, and the Anglophone Caribbean: Exploring Indigenous and African-descendent knowledge through text, archive, and orality ; project lead on the BA/Leverhulme-funded Sonic Islands: Sound, Memory, and Ecology in the Scottish-Caribbean Atlantic Imaginary; and Co-Lead on the AHRC-IAA funded project and exhibition Shifting Waterscapes: Water, Sound, Memory.
Sood is Lecturer in Global Pre-1800 Literatures, with academic interests spanning Sound Studies, Scottish, American, and Caribbean Literatures, Cultural Memory, the Global Eighteenth Century, Practice Research, and the intesections between Postcolonial and Ecocritical thought, Arun's previous books include Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Song, Print, and Memory, c. 1786-1886 (a critical study of the song-collector and poet in Global contexts); New Skin For The Old Ceremony: A Kirtan (a 'road novel' exploring notions of home, heritage, and belonging among the South Asian diaspora in Scotland which won the 2024 Kavya Prize for Fiction); and Searching Erskine (a non-fiction artbook exploring the intersections between sound, art, ecology on the uninhabited Hebridean island of Vallay, released with an accompanying 12 track album). Peer-reviewed articles have also recently appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Romanticism, Island Studies, Review of Scottish Culture, Burns Chronicle, and Global Performance Studies.
Sood’s work often straddles the line between scholarship and creative practice. As a practicing artist and musician, his 2023 solo debut as a Guardian Album of the Year, and recent exhibitions and insallations have appeared at The Box, The National Gallery of Scotland, Exeter Phoneix, and Thelma Hulbert Gallery. A collaborative album with the folk singer Angeline Morrison, which explores uses of the colours brown and black in traditional Gaelic song. is forthcoming with Real World Records X in 2026.
Research supervision
Arun welcomes research projects in the following areas:
- Sound Studies
- The Global Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- Global Romanticism
- Transatlantic Studies
- Orality and Print
- Cultural Memory Studies
- Postcolonial Ecocriticism / Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies
- Place, Heritage, and Diaspora
- Scottish Literature in Global / Transatlantic Contexts
- Anglophone Caribbean Literatures
Arun particularly encourage applicants interested in working across disciplines, forms and genres, and would be happy to hold initial discussions with potential applicants.