Dr Arun Sood

Dr Arun Sood is Lecturer in Global Pre-1800 Literatures. His research and creative practice is underpinned by varied interests including the intesections between postcolonial and environmental writing, oral cultures, sound, practice research, the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and cultural memory studies.

His books include Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory, c. 1786-1886 (a critical study of the  poet and song-collector Robert Burns 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); and Searching Erskine (a non-fiction artbook exploring the intersections between sound, art, ecology, and place released with an audio component). His essays and reviews have appeared the Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

• Arun's intermedia project Peripheral Lament has been selected to appear at Exeter Contemporary Open 2024.  The selection panel, which consisted of independent curator and writer Jes Fernie, artist and educator Tania Kovats, and Exeter Phoenix curator Matt Burrows, met at the end of last week and whittled down several hundred submissions to fifteen artist-researchers.  Arun's contribution is a series of four mixed media collages accompanied by a single channel sound-work inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, and particularly his work's engagement with conceptions of nationalism, universalism and empire.  The collages feature fragments of text taken from manuscripts and documents ranging from Tagore to Thomas Macaulay and Vedic scripture.
• Arun has co-edited a 2024 Edinburgh University Press cross-journal special issue on 'Race and Racism in Scotland'. He is also editing a special issue of the Edinburgh University Press peer-reviewed journal The Burns Chronicle on 'Burns and North America', forthcoming 2025.
• Arun was recently awarded an AHRC IAA grant for the project Resisting Silence: Revealing everyday lives of plantations through material, oral, and archival histories. The project is co-led with museum curator Dr Marenka Thompson-Odlum (Pitt Rivers Museum) and archaeologist Dr Ashley Coutu (University of Oxford). It focuses attention on the neglected landscapes of colonial estates on the island of St Lucia (a British colony between 1814-1979), and the lives of enslaved people who laboured on them. A major follow on grant is in preparation.
• Arun recently published and released a creative non-fiction book and accompanying 12" vinyl album titled Searching Erskine which explores the intersections between place, landscape, and memory through a focus on the uninhabited island of Vallay in the Outer Hebrides. It has received attention from several shows on BBC Radio 3, BBC 6 Music's Cerys Matthews Show and BBC Scotland. The album was also The Guardian's 'Folk Album of the Month' in March 2022. Plans to tour the accompanying project exhibtion are currently underway.
• Arun published his debut novel New Skin For The Old Ceremony with award winning pyublisuher 404 INK in September 2022. The novel explores the intersections between personal histories and broader colonial legacies among the South Asian diaspora in Scotland.
• In April 2023, Arun's article “We were amused by an itinerant singing-man”: Print, Writing, and Orality in Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa" appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
• Arun is currently preparing his second monograph, Scottish Print Culture, Cuba, and the Caribbean, c. 1700-1800, co-authored with Cuban novelist, translator and scholar Dr Félix Flores Varona.

• 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
• Sound Studies