Aarthi Vadde: A Modern Woman

Recess Arts Editor and Towerview writer Katie Zaborsky sat down for a bustling Sunday morning brunch at Mad Hatter’s Bakeshop and Cafe with Assistant Professor of English Aarthi Vadde. Halfway through her second year of teaching at Duke, Vadde has already garnered a reputation as a breath of fresh air for her progressive attitude toward the canon and her eloquent, encouraging demeanor. Vadde (pronounced “va-Day”) is currently teaching two courses in the English department, an undergraduate class, “The Contemporary Anglophone Novel,” and a graduate-level seminar, “Transnational Modernism and the Novel.” Discussing everything from modernist superstars to the merits of being an only child (“only children are smart, good people”), Vadde’s light-hearted humor and academic insights are evident both in and out of the classroom.

"Is it OK if I call you Aarthi now?”

Upgrading from “Professor Vadde” to “Aarthi” over fresh-squeezed orange juice and Earl Grey tea was not the monumental leap I had expected it to be. Having taken two classes with her, I had been referring to Professor Vadde by her first name in out-of-class conversation for over a year now—but never face-to-face. “You should take a class with Aarthi before you graduate.”

“I saw Aarthi at Motorco during the Junot Diaz reading!”

“Yeah, I want to raid Aarthi’s closet—and her bookshelves.”

I didn’t reflect too much on this habit, nor did other people, it seemed. Calling college professors by their first names is no longer an indication of disrespect; rather, it can signify affinity, appreciation, approachability.

After two hours of chatting, it became clear why I had been dropping her professorial title. Vadde embodies not only academic intelligence but also what academia can be: energetic, inclusive, personal.

At 32 , Aarthi Vadde is the youngest faculty member in the English department. Walking the halls of the Allen Building, she is often mistaken for a student, something that Vadde has grown to accept and even embrace.

While Vadde acknowledges that lecturing works under certain constraints, it’s free-form dialogue that has been the vehicle for unpacking novels like Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” J.M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” and James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

In Vadde’s “Joyce in the World” course, we spent roughly half the semester tackling “Ulysses,” a novel with a reputation as exhausting as the text itself. “The great thing about ‘Ulysses’ is that you can take almost any interpretation you want, and you could be correct,” I remember her saying.

What Vadde managed to do was portray Joyce as fallible, conquerable. For many, the literary baggage surrounding Joyce is enough to run the other direction, but Vadde ensured us that the journey would only be slightly nauseating. Criticism and adulation were equally encouraged if you could defend your argument in a cogent way, which seemed to be Vadde’s modus operandi.

“I think the higher you get in the major—or if you go to graduate school—you don’t need a professor to tell you what to do,” she says. “You just need a professor to give you the guidance you need to think the way you want to think.” Vadde seems to have a soft spot for the dissenters. She sees the English major itself as providing tools to question departmental assumptions and professors alike, an approach she also uses in the literature she teaches. Speaking about Virginia Woolf and James Joyce—two paragons of modernist literature—Vadde describes a hierarchy that she tries to disrupt when teaching both authors. She describes how gendered assumptions, even with an established name like Woolf, can cloud notions of what great writing is supposed to look like.

“The reason that Joyce attracts so much attention is partly because Joyce—who is obviously brilliant and a genius—cultivates an idea of genius that appeals to a lot of people who want to believe in heroic genius—who want to believe that there is one person who’s better than everybody else and maybe they can be that person. And I don’t think that Virginia Woolf buys into any of that, and so I sort of don’t buy into any of that.”

While both Joyce and Woolf have now secured a place in the modernist canon, Vadde mentions that a critic once labeled Woolf a “provincial lady writer” and not a modernist—an idea that has persisted with stubborn vestiges in current popular thought.

Vadde is not afraid of irreverence toward classic texts, because, for her, English is supposed to give students the tools to assert themselves so that “when they cross you, they cross you better.”

Born in Staten Island, Vadde is a second-generation American. Her parents, who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s, are from Andhra Pradesh in southern India. As in many immigrant narratives, identity for Vadde is complex and not easily pinned down.

“I have a very complicated relationship to how I identify. This is probably the psychoanalytic reason why I like modernism,” she laughs. “I never liked the idea of leading with my race. And so, I am fully aware that people will see me and make certain assumptions. But it’s never something that I took any comfort in.”

With an older sister 12 years her senior, Vadde felt very much like an only child growing up, and she is quick to point out that only children incur an unnecessary reputation. “I wasn’t horribly lonely, I wasn’t horribly selfish,” she says. “I think it’s ridiculous the way only children are talked about in our culture.”

Although her parents and older sister are all physicians, Vadde knew that when she “considered medical school for about five minutes,” it was only a brief interim from a more deep-seated interest in the humanities. She credits her parents, who encouraged her in gymnastics and painting lessons alike, for laying out many trajectories at a young age. Her artistic interests emerged in high school—she commuted into Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School via the Staten Island Ferry every day—where she began to direct plays and attend summer film programs.

“I was probably indicating art from around 14 onward,” she jokes. Vadde then went on to attend Columbia University with the intent of being a film major, but switched to English and Comparative Literature soon after. For someone who seems so centered, it’s difficult to believe that Vadde once experienced the awkward hurdles of the American college experience.

“I think finding who you want to spend time with and who shares your interests beyond just the proximity of sharing a floor with some people—that [takes] a little bit of time,” she says, reflecting on her first year at Columbia. “But once that happened, I felt very happy there.” She adds that she felt most at home with the “artsy” kids, a reference to the blanket description for creative outcasts that I had used earlier in the interview.

In what also seems to be a universal way to muse on the past, Vadde characterizes the students from her undergraduate days as falling into one of two categories: those who ventured below 110th street and those who didn’t (Columbia is on 116th). She refers to the former as wanting a smaller-town college experience—a desire that baffled her, given the Manhattan zip code.

“They were at the same three bars every weekend, and those were the people where I thought, ‘Why did you come to New York for college?’” she says, implying that she fell into the latter category. “Most of my friends and I would try to go to the Village and try to go to places where we weren’t old enough to go—and generally, that was fine. When we were being more intellectual, we’d go to museums, go to plays, but that was not as often as I’d like to pretend.”

After Columbia, Vadde went on to receive her doctorate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before accepting a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard in 2010. The following year, Vadde joined Duke’s English faculty as a contemporary literature professor, a position that was appealing not just because of the job itself but also in the way it was advertised. According to Vadde, job listings for doctoral candidates in English literature are commonly organized by period, such as “Victorian literature” or “Romanticism”—categories that can breed near-identical syllabi across the country.

“Duke was the only one who said they wanted a contemporary scholar, post-80s,” notes Vadde. “That was the only job in the country that looked like that.” Contemporary literature has been historically defined as works produced after World War II, but as Vadde points out, “How long can you say post-’45 is contemporary before you sound ridiculous?” A slippery category to begin with, Vadde is also fighting against the notion that everything worth writing has already been written.

“There’s not a lot of intelligent work about what makes contemporary fiction good,” she asserts. “There’s a lot of intelligent work on what makes it bad. And it comes out of a kind of nostalgic attitude and a real cynical attitude about presses, about publishers in general and this sense that we’re always largely in decline.”

This sentiment drives Vadde’s personal philosophy about the value of contemporary literature— and more importantly, translating that sense of value to her students.

“You have to actually come in and point out not what is devolving but what is new about new fiction because there is a tendency to think that new fiction is just a warmed-over version of whatever great novelist you’ve made a career of teaching,” she adds.

Those great novelists—the Joyces, the Woolfs—are situated in Vadde’s syllabi alongside works that have only been released in the past five years, such as Gail Jones’ “Five Bells” or Zadie Smith’s “NW,” both of which happen to invoke Joyce in explicit references or stylistic appropriation.

In addition to tackling the contemporary, Vadde also specializes in modernism, another vague, sticky term with multiple meanings. Of the few definitions that Vadde offers, it’s the one that she labels as “political” that perhaps best embodies the literary movement.

“When you see any kind of art that confronts you, that might anger you, that might challenge you because it’s not beautiful or immediately recognizable as art—that’s the modernist spirit,” she says. “So it’s not just a set of texts that are in the canon. It’s a kind of relationship to the social world that’s a little bit perverse.” Initially drawn to modernism while studying at Columbia, Vadde describes the movement as “world-changing or at least world-interested.” For a university that’s invested in making waves around the world, the smaller currents begin with professors like Vadde who are equally devoted to shaking up ideas from the inside out.

As we put on our coats to leave Mad Hatter’s, I notice that Aarthi and I are dressed almost exactly alike: black peacoat, black skinny jeans, black boots. Yet for someone who looks like my style doppelganger, the student-professor boundary still hummed in the background, however softly. I am reminded of one of Aarthi’s own habits that I noticed one day in our Joyce class: after you speak up, Aarthi will nod, process your comment for a second or two, and repeat your thoughts with more careful, meaningful language to where you wish you had phrased it that way to begin with. But you didn’t. Next time you want to. And you’re reminded why you’re taking a class with Professor Vadde in the first place.