English professor co-edits ‘Brave New Teenagers’

Balaka Basu, a faculty member in the English Department, is co-editor of the recently published “Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers.” The book is the latest volume in Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture Series, and it includes a chapter by Basu titled “What Faction Are You In? The Pleasure of Being Sorted in Veronica Roth’s ‘Divergent.’”

Basu joined the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences faculty in 2013. She earned a doctorate in English from City University of New York; her bachelor’s degree is from Cornell University.

An assistant professor of English, Basu researches children’s and young adult literature; new media studies and digital humanities; fan, reception and audience studies; television studies; narrative theory; adaptation studies; queer theory; novels of the “long” 19th century (British and North American); early modern/Renaissance fiction; science fiction and fantasy; popular culture studies; and genre fiction.

According to the publisher, the protagonists of young adult dystopias are introducing a new generation of readers to the pleasures and challenges of dystopian imaginings. As the dark universes of young adult dystopias continue to flood the market “Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers” offers a critical evaluation of the literary and political potentials of this widespread publishing phenomenon. (Dystopias usually are fictional communities/societies that are undesirable or frightening in some way.)