The Department of Comparative Literature congratulates Ishanika Sharma, this year’s recipient of the Lore Metzger Dissertation Prize. Ishanika will be graduating in Spring 2024 with a PhD in English and a Certificate in Comparative Literature. Her PhD dissertation, Postcolonial Eventality: Fictions of Catastrophe in South Asia, draws from postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory in order to read what she calls “eventality,” a literary attunement to the non-linear temporality of geopolitical and environmental catastrophes in modern South Asian fiction.