Goutam Piduri

Dissertation Project: Owning Renunciation

My dissertation turns on a central conundrum: how does the ethical refusal of material wealth become both a moral imperative and a mechanism of exclusion in English culture? My research shows that certain figures are racialized as economically irrational even as their poverty makes them aspirational.

Part One focuses on two genres of non-attachment in early modern England, beginning with the “merry beggar” play of writers like Richard Brome. I read this genre as a quasi-pastoral form that recasts the supposed barbarity of itinerant behavior into the stillness of ethical clarity. I pair this chapter with the metaphysical conceit in the late seventeenth-century poetry and meditations of Thomas Traherne, who aligns metaphor with material accumulation in order to renounce both as barbarous. Part One thus describes the features of literary non-attachment that undermine the connection between economic rationality and civility.

Part Two takes these concerns to explicitly colonial settings. Chapter Three studies English East India Company ethnographies in Surat, where descriptions of non-attachment are divided between the fakir and the Brahmin. While the fakirs are seen as rogues that play at non-attachment, the Brahmins are supposedly genuine practitioners of an ethic of moderation. Ethnographic material at the turn of the 17th century thus imports caste logic to adjudicate non-attachment’s civilizational qualities. Chapter Four focuses on the missionary work of John Eliot in Massachusetts, where a conversion to Christianity is figured as a conversion to non-attachment and a propensity to work without expectation of reward; I read Eliot’s work as an attempt—against his colonial supervisors—to establish Puritan Massachusetts as an empire of poverty that seeks to align non-attachment with civilizational good.

Publications

Journal Articles

• “‘The World of Woman Arises’: Gundamma Katha reads Taming of the Shrew.” Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 16:2 (2025).
• “Imperious Godly Beggars: Brome’s ‘Jovial Crew’ as Pseudo-ethnography.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (revising for resubmission, 2026).

Under Peer Review

• “‘Things that amaze but will not make us wise’: Objects of Civility in Thomas Traherne.” Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory.
• “Genius for the Ages: Civilizational ‘Good’ in Dryden and Aurobindo’s Shakespeares.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 25.3-4.
• “Whirlpools of Westernization: The Image of Gandhi and Hindu Moral Order in Sudigundalu.” Studies in South Asian Film and Media.

Translations

• “Snake,” by Tripura. Denver Quarterly 57.2 (2023).
• “Waiting for Bhagavantam,” by Tripura. Asymptote Journal, Summer 2020.
• “At the Hotel,” by Tripura. Asymptote Journal special feature (2019).

Fellowships & Awards

• Graduate Certificate in Collaborative Humanities, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University (2025)
• Longlisted, Mozhi Translation Prize for Translated Short Fiction in an Indian Language (2023)
• Graduate Fellowship, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University (2023)
• NEH Summer Institute, “Global Geographies of Knowledge in Early Modern Spaces, 1400-1800,” Saint Louis University (2023)
• Folger Shakespeare Library Seminar: Researching and Writing the Early Modern Dissertation (2022)

Selected Conference Presentations

• “Traherne’s Cosmologies.” Shakespeare Society of America (SAA) Annual Conference, Boston, MA (2025).
• “Good Texts: Nationalist Value in Shakespeare Criticism in Dryden and Aurobindo.” Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Annual Conference, Chicago, IL (2024).
• “Teaching Early Modern Literature Contrapuntally, or: Felicity’s Doubled Meaning.” Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA (2024).
• “Imperious Godly Beggars: Fakirs, Brahmins, and Early Modern Orientalism.” Shakespeare Society of America (SAA) Annual Conference, Portland, OR (2024).
• “Shakespeare’s Canonicity in Gundamma Katha.” Northeastern Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Annual Conference, Boston, MA (2020).