Short story: Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, essays, and translation have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Literary Hub, Bustle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has won Berkeley Fiction Review‘s Sudden Fiction Contest, received a Monson Arts Residency, has been named runner-up for The Brooklyn Review‘s Short Story Contest, and Massachusetts Review‘s Jules Chametzky Translation Prize. A writer and professor of English based in Sacramento, California, Torsa grew up in Bengal, India.
Long story: Torsa Ghosal is a writer and scholar of humanities with research interests in narrative theory, AI, cognitive studies, and world literature. She was born in Calcutta, India, and lives in Sacramento, USA, where she is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at California State University. Her experimental novella, Open Couplets, was published by Yoda Press (India), and her scholarly book on literature and cognitive cultural studies titled Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative was published by the Ohio State University Press in fall 2021, and has since become an academic bestseller.
Torsa’s work has appeared in Bustle, Lit Hub, Massachusetts Review, Himal Southasian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Catapult, won annual fiction contests of Berkeley Fiction Review and The Brooklyn Review, and named a finalist for the Best Literary Translations Anthology (Deep Vellum Press). Identified as one of the notable books of September 2017 by World Literature Today, her novella Open Couplets follows the chimera-chasing adventures of ethnographer Ira Chatterjee for a lost idol-maker in Kolkata and a missing poet in Lucknow.
From 2016-19, she edited the South Asian literary magazine, Papercuts. She has also worked as a freelance reporter for The Times of India’s Kolkata Mirror, a web portal of Network 18, and as a coordinator for The Statesman Voices. The Government of India awarded her the National Bal Shree Honor for excellence in Creative Writing when she was sixteen.
Out of Mind, Torsa’s first monograph, builds on her doctoral thesis and explores how aesthetic treatments of thought and scientific models of cognition cross-pollinate, especially in the aftermath of the “cognitive revolution.” The book traces patterns in consciousness representation and representation of mental pathologies. Torsa’s research is informed by theories of cognition (present-day cognitive science as well as twentieth century philosophies of experience), narrative theory, multimodality studies, and comparative media studies. You can listen to key takeaways from Out of Mind in podcasts of the New Books Network and Academic Minute. Read an in-depth review essay on the book here.
Her scholarly essays have appeared in Poetics Today, Studies in the Novel, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, South Asian Review, Post Script, and Latinos and Narrative Media. She is the editor of Global Perspectives on Digital Literature (Routledge) and co-editor (with Alison Gibbons) of Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives (University of Nebraska Press). In this interview for Faculti, Torsa discusses highlights from Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives.
She has held visiting scholar positions at University of Leuven, Belgium, and Justus Liebeg University, Giessen, Germany, and has given invited lectures at several academic institutions across the world, including Ashoka University, India, University of Toledo, US, and University of Wuppertal, Germany.
Listen to the Narrative for Social Justice podcast she co-hosted at Anchor, Spotify, or Apple podcasts.