Interim Director, Center for South Asian Studies; Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
About
Madhumita Lahiri is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interrogates the stories that large, multiethnic democracies – like India, South Africa, and the United States – tell themselves about identity, collectivity, and political mobilization. In her first book, Imperfect Solidarities, published by Northwestern University Press in 2020, she centered the works of Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, and W.E.B. Du Bois to theorize a practice of print internationalism, one that coined new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color). In her current book manuscript in progress, How We Hate Now: Xenophobia in the Age of Antiracism, she investigates the apparent end of such progressive internationalisms in our own time. Educated in India and the United States, Madhumita previously held research and teaching positions at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and the University of Warwick (UK).
Field(s) of Study
- African Literature
- African-American Literature
- Comparative Literature
- Gender and Sexuality
- Global and Transnational
- Modernism
- Postcolonial Studies
- South Asian Literature
- South Asian Cinema
- Theory
