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Pavan Manogaran is a cultural theorist working in and around the fields of (20th and 21st century) contemporary literature and cultural studies. He received his PhD in English Literature & Cultural Studies from King鈥檚 College London, and his work engages heavily with critical and literary theory as well as affiliated intellectual fields such as postcolonial studies, queer studies, nationalism studies, and political theory.
One of the key themes that animates Pavan鈥檚 current research is studying nationalism鈥檚 continual generation of outsider figures and its intersections with race, gender, and sexuality. At the moment, he is working on his first monograph that examines heteronormativity as a modality for the transmission of nationalism in postcolonial Singapore. Drawing on a range of texts such as political biographies, legal texts, archival records, oral histories and more, the book analyses the production of subjectivity in independent Singapore, and demonstrates how affects of belonging and non-belonging can be articulated through the governance of sexuality.
A second project that Pavan is involved in considers sports as a site of politics and culture. In particular, he focuses on elite professional football and its entanglements with market logics, capital accumulation, as well as various corporate and political interests. In previous work, Pavan studied the aestheticization of solidarity where elite football clubs strategically manipulate and mobilize affects of solidarity to further their corporate interests. Presently, he is working on a project that theorizes the necropolitics of the 2022 FIFA World Cup held in Qatar.
Pavan鈥檚 work has been published in journals such as Critical Discourse Studies, Culture, Theory and Critique, the Journal of Language and Sexuality and he has also written for the King鈥檚 English and LSE Southeast Asia blogs, Back Page Football, and Atticus Review.
