Professor K Narayana Chandran, spent upwards of 30 years at the University of Hyderabad, finishing as Institution of Eminence Research Chair Professor in Literary and Cultural Theory, 2021-2024. KNC, as he is widely known, has published in English and Malayalam throughout his distinguished career. Over the years, KNC has taught all the core courses in the Department, and offered fascinating electives on stories, reading, American Literature and others. Having nurtured students across multiple generations, the KNC Effect may be gauged from the responses he still elicits whenever he delivers his extra mural talks – indeed, many English teachers in India owe their careers to KNC’s classes at MA level and have been known to cite his lectures from twenty years ago.
He has coordinated numerous conferences, workshops and seminars in the Department of English, and was the Coordinator for the Department’s Special Assistance Program (UGC DSA-SAP) for several years. He has been a speaker at numerous academic programs across India.
An active, consistent and brilliant researcher, KNC is the author and / or editor of ten books in English. The bulk of his work, however, is to be found in the world’s top ranked journals. In many cases, the only Indian academic in English literary studies to have
published in these reputed journals, KNC’s work has appeared in Verbatim, Studies in Short Fiction, Journal of Modern Literature, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Paideuma, American Notes and Queries, English Language Notes, South Asian Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Cambridge Quarterly, American Literature, Comparative Critical Studies, English Studies, Changing English, Yeats Eliot Review, Weber Studies, Notes and Queries, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, English in Education, Anglia, Neophilologus, Pacific Coast Philology, Hermēneus, The British Fantasy Society Journal, Notes on American Literature, Radical Teacher, Journal of Reading, Nebraska English Journal, Explicator, Pedagogy, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Renascence, The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual.
His chapters have appeared in anthologies from Bloomsbury, Rowman & Littlefield, Orient BlackSwan, Thomson/Gale and others. He has also been a contributor to The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and the The People’s Linguistic Survey of India.
KNC is also a well-known translator. His Romeoyum Juliettum. (Romeo and Juliet in Malayalam translation appeared from DC Books. His translations and essays in Malayalam appeared in Kerala Kavita, Samakaaleena Kavita, Samakaalika Malayalam Vaarika, Malayalam Literary Survey, Bhāshā Pōshini.
For the last several decades, according to an annual study ‘Contributions in the Field of Arts and Humanities’ conducted by the Centre for Publication Ethics, Savitribai Phule Pune University, KNC is the most published author in the field in South Asia.