Currently Dr. Jap-Nanak Kaur Makkar is Assistant Professor at the Department of English; formerly she was ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022) at the same department. Her research examines South Asian and South African fiction, looking comparatively at these literatures and their relationship to poststructuralism. She has additional research interests in aesthetics and politics, and the history of critique. 

Dr. Makkar's book project, tentatively titled Enigmas of Capital: Literature and Theory in the Late Twentieth Century, explores the entanglement of theory and postcolonial literature by interpreting the role of 'enigmas' in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. Some of her work has appeared in New Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature and boundary 2.