Executive Committee
EXECUTIVE BOARD 2024-2026
President
Dr. Maryse Jayasuriya is professor of English at Saint Louis University. Previously, she served as Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts for 8 years at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature, 1983-2009 (Lexington, 2012) and the editor of The Immigrant Experience: Critical Insights (Salem Press, 2018). She also guest-edited a Special Issue of South Asian Review (33.3) on Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature.
Vice President
Dr. Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. His research interests include postcolonial literatures, subaltern studies, diaspora theory, globalization theory, film studies, and animal rights/representations. He has been published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas.
Secretary
Dr. Meghan Gorman-DaRif is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University. Her research considers historical revolutionary violence in contemporary Anglophone fiction, focusing on the Naxalite Movement in India and the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. She has published in the South Asian Reviewon the contemporary Naxal novel and in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on the Mau Mau Uprising in the context of Kenya’s 2007 post-election violence.
Treasurer
Dr. Moumin Quazi is Professor of English at Tarleton State University. In addition to being a longtime member of SALA, he has edited CCTE Studies for 10 years; he also edits the book series, “South Asian Art, Literature, and Culture Studies” (Peter Lang Publishing); and, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas.
Editor, South Asian Review
Dr. Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University. She is co-editor (with Bonnie Zare) of Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India and co-author (with Amy Bhatt) of Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest. She has published articles on Bharati Mukherjee, Lalitambika Antherjanam, and M.G. Vassanji, among others.
Editor, Salaam
Dr. Nidhi Shrivastava is Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Sacred Heart University. Her monograph, India’s Daughters and the #MeToo: Revisiting the Culture of Silence in Partition Narratives (1948-Present), explores the history of rape in Hindi cinema, the 1947 Partition Archive, and the limited success of the #MeToo India. She is also co-editing The MeToo Hashtag and The Movement: Victim-Survivorhood, Agency, Sexual Violence in South Asia.
Web Manager, southasianliteraryassociation.org
Dr. Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. His research interests include postcolonial literatures, subaltern studies, diaspora theory, globalization theory, film studies, and animal rights/representations. He has been published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas.
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEMBERS
2023-2025
Dr. Nidhi Shrivastava is Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Sacred Heart University. Her monograph, India’s Daughters and the #MeToo: Revisiting the Culture of Silence in Partition Narratives (1948-Present), explores the history of rape in Hindi cinema, the 1947 Partition Archive, and the limited success of the #MeToo India. She is also co-editing The MeToo Hashtag and The Movement: Victim-Survivorhood, Agency, Sexual Violence in South Asia.
Dr. Ayesha Irfan is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi. Her specialization is in the field of African American Literature with a PhD on the works of the Black American writer Toni Morrison from Jamia Millia Islamia. Her thesis is titled “Quest for Black Identity and Self-Definition in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” Ayesha is also a translator and translates from Urdu and Hindi.
Dr. Zachary Bordas, Assistant Professor of English at Talladega College, Alabama, earned his Ph.D. in English at LSU (2024). He has published in South Asian Review (2021), Postcolonial Interventions (2019), and Journal of Contemporary Poetics (2017). He currently serves as both the Graduate Representative on SALA’s executive committee and as an Interview Editor for its newsletter, Salaam. He is an LSU Graduate Scholars Program Awardee for the Center for Community Engagement, Learning, and Leadership (2023-2024).
2024-26
Dr. Ruma Sinha teaches at Rider University. Her research and publications engage with the literature of South Asia and the diaspora, especially as they challenge the social and political positioning of Dalit women and the often homogenizing narratives of mainstream postcolonial and feminist interventions. Her articles have appeared in the South Asia Review and The Global South. She is currently co-editing a volume on The MeToo Hashtag and The Movement: Victim-Survivorhood, Agency, Sexual Violence in South Asia.
Dr. Billie Thoidingjam Guarino teaches at Saint Anselm College. She is co-editing, The MeToo Hashtag and The Movement: Victim-Survivorhood, Agency, Sexual Violence in South Asia, (under contract with Lexington Books) and working on her first book on insurgency, gendered violence, and social movements in northeastern India. Her research examines inclusive pedagogy vis-à-vis minority literature(s), feminist security studies, migration, conflict & insurgency in India’s borderlands.
EX-OFFICIO MEMBERS
Past President
Dr. Cynthia Leenerts, Associate Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University, teaches British, postcolonial, and world literatures. She co-edited (with Lopa Basu) Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander and (with George Bozzini) Literature Without Borders: International Literature in English for Student Writers. She is currently researching Tagore’s travel writings and other intersections of Indian and Chinese literatures.
Associate Editors, South Asian Review
Dr. John C. Hawley is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. Past president of the US chapter of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, former chair of his department, and former member of three executive committees of the Modern Language Association, he has edited 16 books and published many articles on postcolonial topics. He is a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation study grant at their Bellagio Center, and of five NEH summer stipends.
Dr. Maryse Jayasuriya is professor of English at Saint Louis University. Previously, she served as Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts for 8 years at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature, 1983-2009 (Lexington, 2012) and the editor of The Immigrant Experience: Critical Insights (Salem Press, 2018). She also guest-edited a Special Issue of South Asian Review (33.3) on Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature.
Dr. Pallavi Rastogi is an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University. She has published widely on South Asian and South African literature, including a book, Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race and National Desire in South Africa and an edited anthology, Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Heritage Within Britain. She is currently completing a book on postcolonial disaster.
Dr. Robin E. Field is Professor of English at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She authored Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction (2020) and is co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (2022), #MeToo and Modernism (2022), and Transforming Diaspora: Communities beyond National Boundaries (2011) She is editor of Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts and managing editor of South Asian Review.
Dr. Amit R. Baishya is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He has authored Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge, 2018), co-edited Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge, 2019), and co-edited two journal special issues—”Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory, the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman” (Postcolonial Studies, 2022) and “Insides-Outsides: Anglophone Literature from Northeast India” (South Asian Review, 2023).
2025 Conference Chairs
Rajorshi Das is a PhD candidate in English studying contemporary liberal queer narratives emerging out of India across print and digital platforms. Their dissertation relies on decolonial and anti-caste methodologies and interviews to unpack the messiness of queer and trans storytelling in the region. Their articles have been published or are forthcoming in Postcolonial Text, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Dr. Amrita Ghosh, Assistant Professor of English at University of Central Florida, is the author of Kashmir’s Necropolis: Literary, Cultural and Visual Texts (Lexington Books 2023), and co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning (Brill 2022) and ReFiguring Global Challenges: Literary and Cinematic Explorations of War, Inequality and Migration (Brill 2023). Her research interests are in the field of postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender and agency, colonialism and representation, conflict zones and border studies.
Dr. Arnab Dutta Roy, Assistant Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University, does research at the intersection of postcolonialism, human rights theory, and modern South Asian literature. His work has been published in the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Review, Genre, American Book Review, Literary Universals Project, Comparatist, Humanities, and the APA Studies on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies.