On Wednesday, June 17, 2025, Dr. Drishadwati Bargi, newly incoming LSA Collegiate Fellow and Assistant Professor at U-M's Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, gave a presentation as part of a faculty-led panel at the World History and Literature Initiative (WHaLI) 2025 Teacher Workshop.
The workshop, held across two days (June 16 and 17), was the 16th annual workshop held under the WHaLI title. A unique collaboration between the U-M International Institute's Title VI National Resource Centers and the Marsal Family School of Education, WHaLI workshops have aimed to deepen teachers' understanding of world history, literature, and the ways in which their students learn new historical ideas since their inception in 2009. This year's workshop took place in the Prechter Lab in the School of Education Building, and teachers in History, Social Studies, and English and Language Arts (ELA) were invited to attend.
Titled “Gendered Exclusion and Caste: Examples from Dalit Literature”, Dr. Bargi's presentation focused on one particular text—Yashica Dutt's Coming Out as Dalit—and offered two potential frameworks that could make a potential population of American high school students who are being taught about caste both read the text and be reflexive about what constitutes reading any literary text. The work chosen belongs to a list of books, personally curated by Dr. Bargi, that she hopes teachers might consult if they were to teach Dalit literature to high school students here: a combination of historical works as well memoirs and cinema in an accessible format.
The presentation's emphasis on framework comes from Dr. Bargi's training as a cultural theorist, wherein one is not just trained to understand the meaning of a text but also focus on how a text is produced, what its historical conditions were, what drove it to make the formal choices it did, and how it is read (or misread) in its local, regional, or international context.
Dr. Bargi's presentation was joined in the panel by presentations from Dr. Magdalyne Akiding, Lecturer III of Swahili in U-M's Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and Anna Brotman-Krass, Ph.D. Student in U-M's Departments of Romance Languages and Literature and Spanish. The panel was moderated by Dr. Michelle Bellino, Associate Professor at the U-M School of Education.
Dr. Bargi had arrived at the University of Michigan merely a week before she participated in the WHaLI workshop, making her appearance in the panel her first public presentation in Ann Arbor. Delighted to hear, when learning of WHaLI, that American schools are interested in teaching Dalit Literature, she accepted the invitation with great interest. Dr. Bargi would like to thank Jennifer Lund, Outreach Coordinator for the U-M International Institute, for inviting her, and Dr. Madhumita Lahiri, Director of the U-M Center for South Asian Studies, for recommending her participation.
Immediately prior to her appointment at U-M, Dr. Bargi was a 2024–25 postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Her work lies at the intersection of postcolonial Cultural Studies and theories of authoritarianism in the wake of European fascism, with an emphasis on modern experiences of caste-based exclusion in the Global South. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota and her M.Phil. in Women's Studies and M.A. in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
As an incoming Assistant Professor of ALC and Faculty Member at CSAS, Dr. Bargi is looking forward to working in the esteemed company of scholars whose expertise in Dalit Literature, mediation, visuality, and post-secular formations is in sync with her research and pedagogical interests. She is already collaborating with a U-M colleague in an edited volume and is very enthused by the warm reception she has so far seen from faculty, students, and staff. In the winter 2026 semester, she will teach an undergraduate seminar titled South Asian Cinema and South Asian Feminism, which will mark her first teaching opportunity at U-M. She hopes to be able to contribute intellectually to the existing debate on gender justice in the U.S. from the vantage point of a Global South scholar. Dr. Bargi remarks that WhaLI has opened the doors for more public-facing, community-oriented work, and that she is looking forward to more such engagements with colleagues from other disciplines and regions during her time in Michigan.
