Kamayani Sharma

My experience as a writer, researcher, translator and podcaster in the humanities and social sciences has helped me gain fluency in a diversity of discourses & registers.


My critical, journalistic and creative writing frequently appears in publications, literary periodicals, peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes and curatorial texts worldwide. A former text editor with ART India, she contributes critical writing to Aperture, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, ArtMonthly UK, Critical Collective, Frieze, Momus, Take On Art, The Caravan, The Wire, The White Review and Vox. She has contributed texts to Focus Photography Festival 2012, Serendipity Arts Festival 2018 and Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022. My academic articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Studies in South Asian Film and Media (2015) and edited volumes — South Asian Gothic: Haunted cultures, histories and media (University of Wales Press, 2021), ReFocus: The Films of Zoya Akhtar (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). My poetry has appeared in Cha, Fulcrum, Kartika Review, Pratilipi and The Stinging Fly, the anthology 14 International Younger Poets (Arts & Letters, 2021) and been recognised by Toto Funds the Arts.


I was an Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation grantee at TAKE On Art Critical Writing Ensemble 2015, Critic-in-Residence at Dharti Arts Residency 2018, a finalist at the International Award for Art Criticism 2020, selected for the Momus Emerging Critics Residency 2021 and a recipient of the Kalpalata Fellowship 2022 in Visual Culture Writing, for Scroll.in. I won the RedInk Award 2023 for print journalism in the Arts.


I run South Asia's first independent visual culture podcast - Artaलाप - streaming on all audio apps (Instagram: @art.alaap). 

I also develop and manage the audio content programme of the Sharjah Art Foundation as part of their Editorial & Content Strategy department. To listen to the two series I have produced for SAF so far, click here and here.


My translation practice is between English and Hindustani (both Nāgri and Nasta'liq scripts), my first book-length project being a translation of Anu Singh Choudhary's 'Neela Scarf' (HarperCollins India, 2023).



South Asian Gothic Haunted cultures, histories and media, University of Wales Press •

Home Is Where the Horror Is: Pakistani Films and Historical Trauma

There are two broad positions on the matter of representing historical trauma in cinema. On the one hand: that the experience of trauma is so unimaginable that it can never be fully captured. On the other: that a mass medium like film can facilitate a public process of catharsis by interpreting memories of violence and rupture. The genre of the Gothic, defined by the repeated evocation of the past, is appropriate to tackle psychic wounds, both individual and collective. In this paper, I will analyse two Pakistani films made forty years apart – Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground) (2007) and a film that it copiously references, Khwaja Sarfraz’s Zinda Laash (Dracula in Pakistan) (1967) – and look at how the South Asian Gothic addresses historical trauma. In the case of postcolonial narratives , the Other remains a central feature, if not in direct relation to Empire then to its legacy. While it has inherited the aesthetics of its colonial ancestor, the European Gothic, one prominent aspect of the hermeneutics of the South Asian Gothic has to do with the shock and tremors of Partition – a literal Othering from the Self – that continue into the 21st century as congenital and constitutive features of the modern nation-states that it resulted in.