A scholar, writer, musican, and audio-visual artist, Arun Sood's research and practice is inherently interdiciplinary.
His academic interests include Orality, Sound Studies, Scottish, American, and Caribbean Literatures, Cultural Memory, and the intersections between Postcolonial and Ecocritical thought. He 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.
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 which featured as a
Guardian Album of the Month). His Peer-reviewed articles have 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, recent exhibitions and insallations have appeared at venues such as The Box Gallery (Plymouth), The Millenium Film Workshop (New York), The Phoenix (Exeter), National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh), OT301 (Amsterdam), Thelma Hulbert Gallery (Honiton), and Taigh Chearsabhagh (North Uist). 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.; and he is currently writing a book on the signifiance of sound in understanding Scottish-Caribbean island entanglements, provisionally titled Sonic Islands. For furher information on his artist portfolio, see his personal website.
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.
