2026 SALA Annual Conference Presenter Bios
Manling Xu is a PhD candidate in the Department of South Asian Studies at Peking University. Her research, situated at the intersection of religious ritual and social memory, extends from her Master’s work on historical Chinese Buddhism to her current doctoral research on ritual and community in contemporary South Asia. Her research interests include Ritual Studies, Memory Studies, Anthropology of Religion, Gender Studies, and Comparative Sociology with a focus on South and East Asia. As a researcher focused on faith as a lived practice, she aims to explore how religious traditions adapt to new social contexts and become vital spiritual resources for their communities.
Madhurima Chakraborty is Associare Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. She has edited Global South Asia: South Asian Literatures and the World, Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature (with Dr. Umme Al-wazedi), as well as Special Issues of South Asian Review on “South Asian Literature in the World,” and “Nation and Its Discontents.” Her scholarly work has also been published in Literature/Film Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Asian Review, and Journal of Contemporary Literature.
Jeffrey Cass is the Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English at Arkansas Tech University and has published extensively on Orientalism, particularly in the area of Romantic and Victorian women writers, such as Charlotte Brontë «, Charlotte Dacre, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Felicia Hemans, but also on writers such as Philip Meadows Taylor, whose “Confessions of a Thug” is one of the primary Orientalist novels of British literature in the period and William Godwin’s Mandeville, a signature text on the theme of obsession. Cass has also published two co-edited collections, Interrogating Orientalism (The Ohio SUP, 2006) and Romantic Border Crossings (Ashgate, 2008).
Srikanth Mallavarapu has a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Stony Brook. He has been a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech and a SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Roanoke College. His research and teaching interests include the negotiation of modernity in the postcolonial context, science fiction, critical theories of literature, and of science, technology, and culture.
Pennie Ticen is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Military Institute, where she teaches courses in the Literature of Indian Independence and Empire Writing in British India. A member of SALA since 1999, she has served as Treasurer, Co-Chair for two conferences, and been a member of the Executive Committee. Recent conference presentations have focused on Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House and Gitanjali Shree’s “Tomb of Sand.” Her publications include three entries in Routledge’s 2024 Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English (“Salman Rushdie,” Imaginary Homelands, and The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems of Agha Shahid Ali). She is currently researching the role of translation in the greater circulation of South-Asian literatures as well as pedagogies for helping students in the classroom exploration of complex narratives which explore cultural, religious, and imperial dynamics.
Subrata Chandra Mozumder is a PhD candidate in English Literature and Cultural Studies at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He also teaches in the same department as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Prior to embarking on his current graduate studies, he worked as an Assistant Professor of English at Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He earned a BA (Hons), an MA, and MPhil in English from the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. His articles have been published in many journals, including American, British, and Canadian Studies, Crossings, Harvest, and Praxis. In addition, he has presented scholarly papers at many conferences, including MLA 2025, ACIS/BCPSC 2025, SCMLA 2024, Indigenous Nineteenth-Century 2024, and PAMLA 2023. His areas of interest include, transnational literature and diaspora studies, South Asian women’s poetry, confessional poetry, feminist studies, and postcolonialism.
John Hawley is Emeritus Professor at Santa Clara University and former President of SALA, author of Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction; editor of Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, and others. He serves on the MLA executive committee on Religion and Literature, and is a former Fulbright Scholar and Rockefeller Research Fellow.
Moumin Quazi, Ph.D., Professor of English at Tarleton State University, is the current President of the College English Association, which awarded him the Professional Achievement Award in 2019. SALA recognized him for “Distinguished Achievement in Service to the Field of South Asian Studies” (2022). He is a past-president of SALA and its current treasurer. His most recent publications include a review of Salman Rushdie in Context in the South Asian Review, and book chapters on war trauma: “The Inside-Out Traumas of War in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors in Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature (Routledge Press, 2022) and “Sri Lankan Postcolonial Inversion and a ‘Thousand Mirrors’ of Resistance,” in In the Crossfire of History: Revisiting Women’s War Resistance Discourse (Rutgers UP, 2022). He also wrote Migratory Words (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016). He hosts a weekly radio show, “The Beatles and Beyond.”
Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, has been published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas. His research interests include animal representations in Dalit literature and Digital Humanities. He is the 2024 recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award for Outstanding Service from the South Asian Literary Association and received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching from the College of Arts and Sciences at his university in 2025. He is the current Vice President and Web Manager of SALA and the Executive Secretary/Treasurer and Web Manager of the Conference of College Teachers of English (Texas). He is also the 2nd Vice President of the College English Association.
Maryse Jayasuriya, Ph.D., is a professor of English at Saint Louis University. Before coming to SLU, she was a faculty member for 18 years at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she served as an Associate Dean for the College of Liberal Arts for eight years. 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 was also co-guest editor of two Special Issues of South Asian Review: one on Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature (33.3) and another on Global Sri Lankan Literature and Culture (46.1-2). She has published widely on South Asian and Sri Lankan literature focused on war and violence, trauma, immigration, and gender. She is an associate editor of the South Asian Review and the current President of the South Asian Literary Association.
Cynthia Leenerts, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and Past-President of the South Asian Literary Association, as well as serving on the Board of Directors of the College English Association, teaches postcolonial, British, and world literatures, as well as literary theory, linguistics, the graphic novel, biblical literature, literature and religion, literature of migration, and composition. She co-edited (with Lopa Basu) Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Her recent shorter published works include book chapters in Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: A Critical Anthology, eds. Waseem Anwar and Nosheen Yousaf (Taylor & Francis, Routledge, UK, 2022) and in Muslim Women’s Writing from Across South and Southeast Asia, eds. Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran (2023). A student of Chinese language, culture, and traditional and contemporary literatures, she is currently researching Rabindranath Tagore’s travel writings and other intersections of Indian and Chinese literatures.
Stacia Neeley Campbell currently serves as Director of the Wesleyan Scholars Honors Program at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas and Co-Director of a grant-funded communication studio. She enjoys her work as a writing specialist teaching all levels of rhetoric and composition courses. She holds a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in rhetoric and composition. She has presented at the College English Association Conference for almost a decade and is thrilled to begin serving on its Board in 2026. Her research interests include intersections among communication, social psychology, and composition theory; student success; rhetoric; and most recently, leadership studies. When she is not on campus teaching and mentoring students, you will find her volunteering with service organizations, reading poetry and theory, and enjoying time with friends and family, laughing, traveling, hiking, boating, concert-going, cheering on karaoke, and watching the sun set.
Laura Petersen is an Associate Professor of Professional Writing and Communication and Composition Coordinator at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas at San Antonio and an M.A. in English with an emphasis in Literacy, Technology, and Professional Writing, as well as an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership with an emphasis in Higher Education/Community College from Northern Arizona University. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Higher Education Administration with a focus on Educational Leadership at Liberty University. She has been teaching English Composition and Literature in higher education since 2009 and has a diverse background in working with students at non-traditional trade schools, community colleges, and universities.
Ankita Rathour is a scholar of Hindi cinema. She is currently an Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. Her Ph.D. dissertation analyzes the dead girl trope in Hindi cinema. She was also a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her academic and popular articles have been published widely. She also runs the podcast The Desi Gaze on Indian cinema.
Jason Christian is a writer based in Atlanta, Georgia. His essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Los Angeles Review of Books, Scalawag, and other publications. He is also co-host of the podcast Cold War Cinema and teaches writing at Kennesaw State University.
Md Hasan Ashik Rahman is a PhD candidate in English at SUNY Binghamton. His research explores the intersections of South Asian cinema, adaptation studies, and postcolonial state formations, with a particular focus on Bangladesh and the concept of transnationalism. He has published in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media.
Swati Gilotra is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. As an Instructor of Record, she teaches introductory women’s studies courses to undergraduate students. At UGA, she has also taught Asian American Literature, Ethnic American Literature, Black Diaspora Literature, and Hindi Language. Swati is currently working on her dissertation titled “The Horror of the Hyphen: Translating the Self through the Other,” which explores how hyphenated immigrant identities navigate their marginal space in America by translating their experiences for themselves and others. Her areas of interest include South Asian Literature, Immigrant Literature, Asian American Literature, Women and Gender Studies, and Translation Studies.
Zahin Zaima is a Bangladeshi PhD student at Saint Louis University who thinks a lot about how people who look like her show up on American screens. Her work explores how film, television, and visual culture shape the stories we tell about racialized and marginalized bodies, especially South Asians and immigrants navigating the push and pull of identity, belonging, and representation. She is particularly drawn to the messy, complicated spaces where race, gender, migration, and media collide, and to the ways visual culture both repeats harmful narratives and makes room for new ones. Outside her research, Zahin cares deeply about teaching, advocating for social justice, and searching for new recipes that might interest her very picky nine-pound Pomeranian, Izaan.
Ruma Sinha is an Assistant Professor of English at Mercer County Community College. Her research interests include postcolonial and anti-colonial studies, Dalit studies, Global Anglophone literature, and transnational feminist theory. Her articles have appeared in The Global South and South Asia Review.
Ali Ahsan is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies at University of Georgia, USA. As instructor, he teaches introductory courses on Black Diaspora literature and Asian American literature. His areas of interest include global anglophone literature, race/caste studies, African American literature, intersections between literature and religion, and comparative Indian literature with focus on Kannada literature.
Jomal Jose is a PhD student working on Dalit Rap music at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar, an Off-campus centre of the Homi Bhabha National Institute. He has an MA in English Language and Literature and is a trained teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Education. He has authored an article tilted “Arivu’s Dalit Rap: Cultural Resilience and Harnessing Hip-Hop for Cultural Assertion” in the Sage Journal, Contemporary Voice of Dalit. He has presented his research at the 2025 Modern Language Association Annual Convention, British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) Conference 2025, 2023 Annual South Asia Conference of Ireland India Institute and at a symposium in the Paris Cité University in 2022.
Badusha Peer Masthan is a Ph.D. graduate student in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. One of his papers, “Unveiling the Margins: A Subaltern Analysis of Dalit Muslim Identity in the Literature” (2024), is published in the journal South India Journal of Social Sciences. His notable conference presentations are, namely, “Unveiling the Margins: A Subaltern Analysis of Dalit Muslim Identity in the Literature from South Asia” (2024) at the University of Chicago, USA. “Intersectional reading of Dulari: Caste, Class and Gender” (2023), National Institute of Technology – Surathkal, Karnataka, and “Challenging Feminist Discourse: Dalit Muslim Women’s Voice in Literature” (2023) at Pondicherry University. His research interests are contemporary Indian English literature, Dalit literature, Dalit Muslim literature, and Urdu feminist poetry.
Sandamini Ranwalage is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Skidmore College, New York. Her primary research interests include postcolonial studies and performance studies with a special focus on twentieth and twenty-first-century South Asia and South Asian diaspora. Her recent work examines corporeal forms of nostalgic recollection in literature and performance that negotiate nationalist, colonialist, and imperialist constructions of the past. Her work has appeared in the South Asian Review and Performance Research.
Dinidu Karunanayake is an assistant professor of English at Elon University, North Carolina, USA. His research and teaching concentrate on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone postcolonial literature, Asian American literature, human rights, memory, and diaspora studies. His articles have appeared in such journals as ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, South Asian Review, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and ICES Research Papers, and his chapters have been featured in the edited volumes The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Critical Asian and Asian American Studies (Temple UP), Teaching Anglophone Diasporic South Asian Literature (MLA), and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture. He is also the co-editor of the Special Double Issue of South Asian Review on “Global Sri Lankan Literature and Culture.”
Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University. She teaches courses in postcolonial South Asian and African writing, diaspora studies, and transnational feminisms. Her books include the following: Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (2009); Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (2013); and Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics (2016). She is co-editor of Teaching Anglophone South Asian Diasporic Literature (MLA). She has also published articles in ARIEL, South Asian Review, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is the Chief Editor of South Asian Review.
Jahidul Alam is an Assistant Professor of British and Anglophone Literature at Jackson State University. Originally from Chittagong, Bangladesh, he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, completing a hybrid dissertation that blends critical scholarship with original poetry. His research examines the intersections of race, colonialism, and ecological thought in early modern texts, focusing on authors such as Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Shakespeare, as well as their afterlives in South Asian writing and adaptation. He has presented his work at the Renaissance Society of America, Sixteenth Century Society, and the Shakespeare Association of America conferences and his broader scholarship seeks to build conversations between early modern English literature and contemporary South Asian perspectives on environment, empire, and cultural exchange.
Pallavi Rastogi is the J.F. Taylor Endowed Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where she teaches classes on global Anglophone literature, postcolonial theory, and postcolonial popular culture. She is the author of Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa (2008). She has also published a co-edited collection with Dr. Nalini Iyer, Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature (2024). She is currently working on Asians on the Third Coast: Other Races, Other Cultures in Louisiana, a co-edited book with Dr. Madoka Kishi, under advance contract with LSU Press.
Tharini Viswanath is an Assistant Professor of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at The University of South Carolina. Her work on gender, sexuality, and characters’ corporealities in children’s and young adult literature has been published in a number of journals including Papers, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Jeunesse, The ALAN Review, and South Asia. Viswanath is currently working on a scholarly monograph which examines how feminine adolescent characters’ access to voice and acceptance of their own unique embodiments give them agency in speculative young adult fiction.
Tehmina Pirzada is an Assistant Professor of English at Bradley University in Illinois. Her research examines the cultural constructions of South Asian adolescence within the material, visual, and digital cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Girlhood Studies, and the South Asian Review. She has a forthcoming edited volume with Rutgers University Press on breast cancer narratives in the academy that explores survivorship, embodiment, and feminist knowledge production across borders.
Ishan Mukhopadhyay is a second-year PhD student at the Department of English, Brandeis University. His research interests are Translational and Transnational Studies, Postcolonial Literatures, Toxic Ecofiction, South Asian Literature, Ecomedia Studies, and Migration and Diaspora Literature. This paper on Antiman is a piece from a Graduate Symposium presentation at Brandeis, under the mentorship of Professor Faith Smith.
Meghan Gorman-DaRif is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University in California. Her research centers on Anglophone novels from India and across Africa, focusing on contemporary forms of realist and historical fiction as well as the Indian Ocean as a framework for literature. She has published articles in the South Asian Review on the contemporary Naxal novel in India, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, and has written several chapters for edited collections including for the Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms.
Wafa Asher Syeda is PhD student of Comparative Literature at UChicago where she researches queer utopias, Third World internationalism, Afro-Asian-Arab solidarities, and postcolonial desires. She was a Fulbright scholar at NYU, where she obtained a Masters in History, and she has been organising with labour, feminist, queer groups for the last couple of years. In her free time, she is found reading gay horror, watching terrible reality TV and hosting dinners for her lovely friends.
Asmita Saha is a 4th-year PhD Student in Literary and Cultural Studies at Illinois State University. Her research interests center spatial and aesthetic mapping of precarious and vulnerable spaces in postcolonial scenarios. Her work brings into conversation critical cultural studies, postcolonial studies, spatial theory and environmental humanities, with the attempt to trace and unravel the resonance of colonial and imperial history that emerges in place-oriented research and history.
Ridita Mizan (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English Studies (Literature and Culture track) at Illinois State University, U.S.A., and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh (currently on study leave). Her doctoral research examines the disciplinary identity of English Studies and explores possibilities for delinking the field in postcolonial contexts. Her broader interests include transnational modernism, post- and decolonial theory, cultural rhetorics, and critical pedagogy.
Nidhi Shrivastava works as an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Sacred Heart University. She is developing her monograph, India’s Daughters: #MeToo, Politics of Forgetting, and Representations of Gendered Violence in 1947 Partition Narratives (1948-Present), which explores the #MeToo movement, the 1947 Partition Archive, Hindi cinema, narrative politics, and the experiences of abducted and raped women. She has also co-edited two collections, Bridging the Gaps Between Celebrity and Media with Jackie Raphael and Basuli Deb (2015), and contributed three chapters to Gender Violence, The Law, and The Society (2022), a work widely cited by scholars studying rape laws in India. She has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including South Asian Review and the Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies. She is the Salaam newsletter editor and has been on the SALA executive committee since 2023. She is also the managing editor of SHU Scholar, Sacred Heart University’s undergraduate journal.
Jana Fedtke, Ph.D., is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai. Her research and teaching interests include algorithmic authorship, data justice, science and technology, gender studies, and transnational literatures with a focus on South Asia and Africa. Professor Fedtke’s work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.
Hans-Georg Erney is Professor of English at Georgia Southern University, where he specializes in postcolonial studies and ecocriticism. He was educated in Germany (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen), England (Keele University), and the United States (Emory University). In recent years, he has written on the Indian novelist Geetanjali Shree (Translation and Literature), the British spoken-word poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (Journal of Postcolonial Writing), the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel comic series (Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics), and the British poet Daljit Nagra (ARIEL). He edits the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.
Rachayita Bhattacharyya is a PhD. scholar in the School of Liberal Arts at IIT Jodhpur. Her research explores the politics of gender in the context of English Language Haiku in India. Her interest areas include gender, authorship, canonicity, postcolonial studies. She has previously presented a paper on the topic “Haiku Jam! Learning Haiku!” at Unconference organised by Electronic Literature Organisation. She has successfully completed her B.A. (Hons.) in English and M.A. in English while working full time at a Government organisation (LIC of India). She has cleared UGC NET and GATE (AIR 9).
Umme Al-wazedi is a professor of postcolonial literature in the Department of English and the Division Dean of Humanities at Augustana College. Her research and teaching examine the intersectionality of multiple social identities such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, ability, and sexuality, and present counternarratives of marginalized women, communities, and people seen within oppressive locations and structures such as colonialism, imperialism, neo-imperialism, and patriarchy. Her research and teaching interests encompass postcolonial literature, British literature, (Muslim) women writers of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Muslim feminism, and postcolonial disability studies. She has published in South Asian Review, South Asian History and Culture, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is also the author of several book chapters. Her co-edited books Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature and Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media were published in 2016 and 2024.
Waseem Anwar is Professor of English and Director ICPWE (International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English, https://icpwe.kinnaird.edu.pk/ )at Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore. He has been at FCC and GC universities in the capacity of Dean (Humanities) and Chair (English). Recipient of Fulbright award twice, for doctoral studies in 1995 and as Visiting Scholar in 2007, Dr. Anwar served as the President of the Pak-US Alumni Network (PUAN) and Fulbright Alumni Association. A Gale Group American Scholar, he also received the Punjab Education Department “Salam Teacher Award” (2004) and Pakistan Higher Education Commission “Best Teacher Award“ (2003). He is a Lifetime Member of the South Asian Literary Association (SALA), USA, and has been on its Executive Committee for three times. Apart from being on the Advisory and Editorial Boards of several renowned research journals, and publishing scores of articles, his credit includes books, Black Women’s Dramatic Discourse (2009), the South Asian Review (SAR 2010 – special issue on Pakistani creative writing in English), and very lately Transcultural Humanities in South Asia (Routledge UK, 2022, https://www.routledge.com/Transcultural-Humanities-in-South-Asia-Critical-Essays-on-Literature-and/Anwar/p/book/9780367483715 ). He is also the founding Editor in Chief of the Journal of English Studies, JELLS at FCC university.
Sonia Sharmin teaches English at Augusta University, Georgia, United States. She completed her PhD from the University of Georgia. Her areas of interest are South Asian Literature, Postcolonialism, Cultural Studies, Disability Studies, and motherhood.
Feryal Banday is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. She works on Kashmiri regional literatures, and is broadly interested in the literatures of the global south. Before this, she studied literature at Jamia Millia Islamia and the University of Delhi.
Billie Thoidingjam Guarino, Ph.D., teaches at Saint Anselm College, Manchester. She was the 2022 COARC-Inya Institute Scholars’ Fellow. Her research examines inclusive pedagogy vis-à-vis minority literature(s), postcoloniality, feminist security studies, migration and forced displacement, armed conflict & insurgency in South Asia & Southeast Asia. Her doctoral research focused on resistance movements in Myanmar and Manipur in India.
Brian Yothers is professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Saint Louis University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and journal special issues, including the recent monograph Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now (2023), the co-edited special issue of Leviathan “Melville in Public” (2023), which won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Award for best special issue, and a co-edited special section of PMLA on the Public Humanities (2025). He is past editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and past co-editor of Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, for which he co-edited a special issue on South Asia and the Americas in 2009 with Pramod K. Nayar. He is the author of over 80 scholarly articles and book chapters, including a handful that deal with the interrelationships between South Asian and US literature.
Sudarshan Gautam My name is Sudarshan Gautam, and I am a Research Scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) (BHU), Varanasi. My work brings together Pāṇinian grammatical theory and contemporary approaches to semantic representation. My academic journey began in the traditional Gurukul system of Kashi and continued through formal Sanskrit education at Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, where I developed a strong grounding in Vyākaraṇa, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedic studies. In my PhD research, I analyze multi-word expressions from a Pāṇinian perspective, focusing particularly on compounding (Samāsa) and its implications for Universal Semantic Representation (USR). I am a UGC-NET JRF awardee and have received multiple gold medals in M.A. in Sanskrit Grammar. I have presented my work at national and international seminars and actively participate in Śāstrārtha and Vākyārtha forums. My broader interests include semantics, Indian knowledge systems, translation practices, and exploring collaborative connections between classical Sanskrit thought and modern linguistic inquiry.
Kalyan Nadiminti is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University. They are currently finishing a monograph about contemporary postcolonial literature’s emplotment within US literary and prestige culture entitled Unendurable Freedom: US Empire and Postcolonial Literature after 9/11 (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). Their work has appeared in venues such as NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Verge, Post45/Contemporaries, Journal of Asian American Studies, LARB, and elsewhere.
Shwetha Chandrashekhar is an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Anglophone Literature in the Department of English at the University of South Dakota. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her academic writings have been featured in or are forthcoming in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Critical Inquiry, South Asian Review, South Asian History and Culture, and Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History.
Saumya Lal is an Assistant Professor of English at the Louisiana State University. Her current book project examines the workings of empathy in literary portrayals of political conflicts in postcolonial Africa and South Asia. Her work has been published in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Textual Practice, among other venues.
Mehak Faisal Khan is an Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature in the English Department and in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a fellow at the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and on the board of the Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance series. She received her PhD in English and Critical Theory from UC Berkeley. Her current book project, Ajeeb Aesthetics, mobilizes a theory of the strange, wondrous, queer and uncanny, rooted in the aesthetic and affective categories of contemporary Pakistani culture, as a site from which to rethink global aesthetics. She has been a Co-Chief Editor at Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, and is a founding editor of Tasavvur, the first pan-South Asian speculative fiction magazine.
Mommina Tarar My name is Mommina Tarar and I am an English graduate student with a focus on South Asian literature, pedagogy, and journalism. My research explores the intersections of literature, ecology, and spirituality. I hope to examine how South Asian texts can inform various teaching practices that cultivate a collective understanding with the natural world. In addition to my academic work, I have experience as a freelance journalist where I’ve produced articles on environmental concerns, faith, culture, social justice, and more. I have also held teaching roles at the K-12 level, assisting lead teachers with lesson planning and classroom management. I currently work as an English instructor at Western Washington University, teaching English 101. Through my work, I hope to seek meaningful engagement with South Asian literary traditions while preparing students to think, read, and write critically about literature, culture, and the environment.
Mayuri Deka is the Associate Professor and immediate Past Chair of English Studies at The University of the Bahamas. She has published and presented numerous papers with a focus on multi-ethnic identities, diasporic literatures, Postcolonial literatures, and pedagogy. Recently, Deka has been researching the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion within effective leadership and ways to encourage empathic identities through the use of South Asian and Caribbean literature. Deka has taught a wide range of American and World literature, including texts from various diasporas and focusing on the interactions within cultures and races.
Austin Grant Bennett is a son, brother, friend, husband, and father. By vocation, he works with words. His contributions can be read in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Poetry for the More-Than-Human World (online), and Christianity and Literature. By occupation, he is an associate professor of writing at Montana State University Billings, where he also directs the University Honors Program. Honors include being awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and having served as a Montana University System Teaching Scholar. He works creatively in fiction and poetry, and his criticism has recently expanded into the realm of Critical AI.
Bhawana Pillai is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the English Department in Texas Tech University. She has researched on Arab and South Asian women’s life writings as a mode of remembrance, resistance and solidarity in the face of divisive neoliberal structures as part of her doctoral dissertation. Her current research focuses on graphics representations of protests and collective resistances from Global South locations in South Asia.
Sangamithra Nataraj is a PhD student in English at Michigan State University. Her research interests include indofuturism, South Asian speculative fiction and film, and postcolonial theory. Some of her recent publications include “Eduardo Corral : A Darker Sort of Worship” in Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality and “The Shifting Faces of War: A Study of the Evolution of War Through the Lens of Literature and Print Media” in Kala Journal of Indian Art History. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from New Mexico State University. She is the author of two novels published by Paper Lantern Books, Arianna’s Quest and The Unfavoured Mage. Shreya Sharma (she/her) is a first-year English PhD student and Composition Instructor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She has an M.A in Literary and Cultural Studies from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Some of her areas of interest include cinema, critical caste studies, craft, and food cultures. Shreya also writes poetry and her work has been published in journals like MuseIndia. Embroidery is her craft and she loves making hand-embroidered patches and custom stickers for her friends.