Chandrica Barua

Chandrica Barua (She/her) is a writer, scholar, and translator from Jorhat, Assam, currently based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Chandrica’s research interests are Anglophone literature from the 19th-20th centuries, cultural studies of empire, race, gender, and caste, postcolonial and decolonial thought, and material and visual culture. Her dissertation project analyzes the circulation of and encounters between imperial objects and colonial bodies in Victorian Britain and colonial India through literary texts (fiction, memoirs, travel writing), historical documents, and visual culture from the 1850s to the 1960s. 

Also a translator and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, Chandrica received the 2022 Hopwood Award for Nonfiction, judged by Esme Weijun and Jenny Boulley, and was long-listed for the 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She is the current Nonfiction and Online Editor for Michigan Quarterly Review, the flagship literary journal of the University of Michigan. She has previously received the Zubaan-Sasakawa Peace Foundation (Japan) Grant for Young Researchers from the Northeast in 2019 for which she collected oral folktales from Northeast India and translated them into English with a feminist methodology. The manuscript “Stories by the Fire on a Winter Evening” was published by Zubaan Books. She is currently working on a translation of her maternal grandfather’s memoirs of growing up in rural Assam during the 1930s-40s, which interweaves his personal experiences with the looming backdrop of the tumultuous colonial-imperial regime.

Chandrica’s work has been or will be published in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens (“‘Poor little princess’: Queen Victoria’s Court as a Site of Imperial Conquest) and the Feminist Review (“A Terrible Femininity: Futures of Radical Uselessness”). Her scholarly book reviews have been or will be published in the Journal of Gender Studies, Wasafiri, the Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies, and Sexualities. In 2018, Chandrica received the Sahapedia-UNESCO Fellowship for which she spent six months conducting ethnographic research and oral history interviews with the Tai-Khamyang community in Assam to formulate a new historiography of the migrant Tai communities. Some of the research has been platformed on Sahapedia as research modules. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has taught undergraduate first-year writing and literature courses. As a Research Editor with Museum of Art and Photography, India, she has designed online courses for a non-specialist audience in Textiles, Modern & Contemporary Art, and Photography. She was involved in the Child Development Programme (CDP) as part of the National Service Scheme (NSS) as an undergraduate in India. 

Chandrica has presented her work at various conferences — the Modern Languages Association (MLA), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), and the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS). At the University of Michigan, she is the co-coordinator of the Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop (RIW) Global Postcolonialisms Collective. She has previously coordinated two other RIWs—Topics in Classical Intersectionalities and Critical Visualities—and the seminar series Critical Conversations in collaboration with the Associate Chair of the English Department. 

Chandrica welcomes collaborations in research, writing, teaching, and creative projects.