Fostering New Ideas

P. Mary Vidya Porselvi (center right) delivers a talk on “Food Tales as Environmental Discourse” during her Fulbright-Nehru fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin. (Photograph courtesy Mary Vidya Porselvi)

The 2019 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence (FNAPE) fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin was a thoroughly enriching and fulfilling experience. My project was titled “Indian Classical Ecocriticism: An Ecofeminist-Semiotic Study” and I came up with an innovative concept—a portmanteau term called “Ecofemiotics” to study the signs and symbols of woman-nature proximity in literature and folklore.

During the fellowship, I got the incredible opportunity to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s annual South Asia conference and the Fulbright seminar on sustainability in Minneapolis. They helped me understand niche areas of contemporary research. A visit to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, deepened my beliefs in James Lovelock’s “Gaia Hypothesis,” according to which living matter on Earth collectively defines and regulates the conditions necessary for the continuance of life. This later inspired me to use Gaia as the central metaphor of my poetry collection, “Gaianjali,” published in February 2023 and my latest book “Environmental Humanities in Folktales: Theory and Practice,” published in May 2023.

The FNAPE fellowship also broadened my outlook and gave me more confidence to speak about important societal, cultural and environmental concerns. In 2021, I delivered an online talk, “Green Tales for a Greener Planet: Indian and American Ecocritical Perspectives,” organized by the American Center Chennai and highlighted the Indian belief in diversity and the American faith in multiculturalism.

In the inaugural session of the “To America and Back Again—Writer’s Circle Series” at the American Center Chennai in March 2023, I got a chance to talk about the women writers who influenced me in eco-literature. Some American authors who shaped my consciousness include Rachel Carson, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Joy Harjo and, more recently, Amanda Gorman. Students from different city colleges actively participated in the program and shared their observations and insights. This has motivated me to work more to highlight the needs and rights of women, children and the environment.

Another important area I explored during my fellowship was the significance of writing centers in American universities. Based on my observations and research, I plan to introduce writing centers at my institution and all the sister institutions in and around Chennai. To further discuss this idea, I met with five Fulbright-Nehru scholars, who could be resource persons, in 2023.

Based on the exposure to interdisciplinarity at American universities, I started a department-level forum called RAIN (Research and Interdisciplinary Networking) at my home institution in July 2023. We have collaborative sessions on “Intersectionality in Gender and Women’s Studies” with the Department of Sociology and “Space as a Promising Frontier” with the Astronomy Club. Some of the upcoming lectures include “Trees and Literature” with the Department of Plant Biology, “Films and Literature” with the Department of Visual Communication and “Human Rights and Subaltern Literature” with the Department of Social Work.

My upcoming projects include a poetry collection, a research paper titled “Sharing Humanity Through Storytelling: A Pedagogical Approach to Cultural Inclusivity,” a research monograph on “Medical Humanities in Folktales,” and establishing a writing center to promote academic writing, creative writing and translation, especially for first-generation students in higher education.

P. Mary Vidya Porselvi is an associate professor and head of the Department of English, Loyola College, Chennai.

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