Bio:
I am an associate professor specializing in comparative race and empire studies, philosophies of race and gender, global modernisms, LGBTQ+ studies, trans studies, psychoanalytic studies, postcolonial and global anglophone literatures, transatlantic studies, and the global south. I also serve as the Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
My work explores under examined intersections among interdisciplinary areas of thought and practice. My first book, The Future Life of Trauma (Fordham UP, 2017), studied how traumatic experiences that happened during the 1947 Partition of British India and which continue to occur in post-genocide Rwanda compel us to transform traditional philosophies of time and subjectivity. I am currently working on a book called Transformations of Bodies that explores how different notions of “body” function in politics of race, sexuality, and gender. It shows how the subject cannot always be equated to forms of difference. The manuscript develops a novel concept of the body which does not deny its relations to different types of groups, but which is not reducible to a theory or a practice.
I have worked as an editor and co-translator of multiple texts on psychoanalysis, which have been published with international distribution by Hermann Press in Paris. I am also co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, a quarterly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature published by Indiana University Press.
My teaching is informed by the ways different areas of study in the humanities establish their fields of knowledge. I teach a wide range of courses in the English and Philosophy programs and in the Honors College that explore how we as individual persons and communities think about, constitute, and express our different forms of cultural, social, and political bodies. For example, I teach courses on global modernist literature, theories of transnationalism and globalization, philosophies of race and gender through critical race theories, gender and queer theories, and LGBTQ+ studies, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and biopolitics.