Sarath Jakka is interested in exploring mental health concerns outside the protocols that populate diagnostic and statistical manuals. By attending to the recursive and paradoxical aspects of consciousness and feeling that figure in various guises across the eastern contemplative traditions, psychoanalysis, philosophy of science and literary theory, he hopes to develop an interdisciplinary style of engagement that can set out the blindspots of reductionist and objective approaches to understanding human behaviour while simultaneously throwing into relief the therapeutic, aesthetic and communal possibilities that come into play while listening to what the philosopher Henri Bergson referred to as the ‘duration’ of inner life. He is currently training as a psychotherapist.

Sarath completed his PhD in Early Modern Studies from the University of Kent, Canterbury and the University of Porto in October 2018. His doctoral project was a part of the TEEME (Text & Event in Early Modern Europe) PhD consortium and funded by the European Union through an Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Fellowship. His dissertation looked at the relations between utopian writing and seventeenth-century colonial efforts, focusing on the colonial promotional literature produced for a failed English colony in Madagascar.

Biographical details correct as of 25.09.24