Here is the link to my mother’s doctoral thesis, which was about a book written by Salman Rushdie:
Uma Viswanathan, 2007, Polyphony in Midnight’s Children , doctoral thesis, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis-SC, Brazil.
I am very proud that she was 67 years old at the time of her defense!
She also published the following paper, based on her thesis, when she returned for a couple years to India:
Uma Viswanathan, Polyphony of midnight’s children: dispersion of voices and genres in Midnight’s Children. Acta Scientiarum. Language and Culture 32, 51–59 (2010).
Her Master’s thesis was on Feminism In Bernard Shaw‘s Plays. She got her Master’s in 1989, also in Florianópolis.
Prior to her studies in English literature, she was actually a chemist! She obtained a Master’s degree in Chemistry from Queen’s university, in Kingston, Canada, in the late 1960s. She had graduated from Ethiraj College, University of Madras, Tamilnadu, India. After her graduation from Ethiraj, she attended Presidency College, Chennai, from where she earned her first Master’s degree in General Chemistry.
I am very lucky, in a sense, to have a mother with such wide interests, with whom I can still have fascinating and never ending conversations about so many different topics.
