Cheshta Rajora is a doctoral candidate at Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies (FSGS) where she is working on a dissertation project on the literary representation of mobility crisis and female precarity in contemporary writing. She has been an awardee of the Einstein Scholarship for Students from Global South (2023 and 2024-2025) at FSGS, and is currently a Konrad Adenauer International Young Researcher (2025 to present).   

She holds a BA and MA in English Literature from University of Delhi, and a degree in law from the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi. 

Cheshta Rajora's research project looks at mobility crisis and female precarity in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body (2018) and Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (2023).

She is particularly interested in exploring how the primary texts represent and negotiate with contradictory ideas and pressures of progress and mobility, and stillness and stuntedness. She proposes to read the primary texts as narratives of promise, development and self-actualisation as also of frustration, blockage and failure. They concern themselves with female protagonists who must navigate various challenges in order to survive and integrate in their local environments (such as workplaces, school system and society). Promised a better future, their journeys are beset with failures and frustrations.

Her thesis is that the crisis and tension are staged through ‘affective dissolution’—that is, a dissolution of bodily autonomy and agency, psychological and ontological coherence, linear time, inter- and extra- diegetic identification, and a progressive attrition. A guiding question in her reading is how the writers reach out for two opposing regimes — deep affective intensities coupled with a wry logic of depersonalisation, ethics of distance, non-identification? Through Close-Reading, her project focuses on the formal and literary strategies employed by the primary texts to represent this crisis.