Aakanksha Virkar

Dr Aakanksha J. Virkar specialises in modern literature and culture between 1870-1945 and particularly the relations between literature, philosophy, music and visual culture in this period.

Her more recent research on T. S. Eliot consider Eliot's work in interdiscplinary contexts. Her work brings to light the important relation of Schopenhauer's aesthetics and metaphysics to Eliot's poetry and suggests the influence of Schopenhauer on Eliot's formulation of the 'objective correlative', a cornerstone of twentieth-century literary criticism. She is particularly interested in the relation between Beethoven and Eliot.  Suggesting that Eliot's understanding of Beethoven is framed by the musical aesthetics of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, her published work offers new readings of canonical literary texts.

From 2024-2025, Aakanksha has been awarded a prestigious British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her project 'T. S. Eliot and Beethoven: Aesthetics, Music and Politics 1870-1945'.

She is also a Research Fellow (2023-2026) at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and is working on a joint monograph on T. S. Eliot and Beethoven with the musicologist Prof Daniel Chua (Hong Kong University).

For the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, Aakanksha was an invited guest on BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week' for the 'Beethoven Unleashed' series. Her interview ('Spirit of the Age' Episode 5: 'Legacy and Belief') is available here  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/37916tSXw7s3CRcj9FZjpyq/beethoven-unleashed-the-box-set 

Her earlier work on the Victorian poet G. M. Hopkins has also gained recognition, emphasising Hopkins' previously unacknowledged indebtedness to seventeenth-century visual culture. Her article on Hopkins and emblematics was ranked amongst the 50 Most Read articles published by ‘Literature and Theology’ (OUP) between 2007-2012. Her monograph The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2018) is published in the Routledge Nineteenth Century Series.

Reviews of The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins

“this is a lovely and lovingly realized book that participates in the ongoing so-called turn to religion in Victorian studies in its reassessment of Victorian mysticism and Hopkins’s place in the mystical tradition. Each of its chapters is quickpaced and tightly written, rapidly moving the reader across centuries’ worth of textual, religious, and visual materials… a testament to [Virkar] Yates’s success in capturing the dynamism and profundity of her subject matter”  ---- Winter Jade Werner, Victorian Studies 62.1 (2019): 154-156 (Review)

"Close reading of Hopkins’ never less than challenging verse is pursued in this book with theological rigour and learning in a manner that will ensure that it will become a central resource in scholarship on the finest of late nineteenth century English poets… a work of fine scholarship, theologically learned and poetically sensitive, and yet at the same time spiritually acute and attentive to the delicate, complex world of Hopkins and his writings. This is a book to be treasured and pondered upon."  ---- Professor David Jasper, Literature and Theology (OUP)

Aakanksha Virkar completed her doctorate at the University of Sussex, prior to which she was a Commonwealth scholar at the University of Cambridge, a recipient of a full scholarship from the Nehru Trust for Cambridge University. From 2013-2015 she was a Visiting research fellow at the University of Sussex and also at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, London.

Aakanksha is happy to supervise postgraduate work on late Victorian and modern literature. She has specific interests in literary modernism and would particularly welcome projects exploring literature and the arts (music and visual culture).

Specific areas within literary studies (1850-1950) might include

• Victorian/modern transitions
• philosophy, aesthetics and politics in modern literature
• poetry and poetics
• literature, music and visual culture
• aestheticism, decadence and desire