Assistant Professor, South Asian Literatures
Email: preetha.mani@rutgers.edu
Office: 15 Seminary Place Room 6168, College Avenue Campus
Office Hours: by appointment
Office Phone: 848-445-4703
Education
Ph.D. South and Southeast Asian Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, University of California, Berkeley
M.A. South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
B.A. English and Philosophy, Tufts University
Areas of Research and Interest:
Modern Hindi and Tamil Literature, South Asian Feminisms, Women’s Writing, World Literature, Translation Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Genre Studies.
My research focuses on how representations of the Indian woman are used to shape ideas of regional and national identity, and experiences of belonging, in the aftermath of Indian Independence. I am currently completing my book manuscript, which chronicles the emergence of the short story as a preeminent genre in twentieth century Hindi and Tamil literature. The book proposes a view of Indian literature as a field of comparative literature that is comprised of mutually imbricated local, regional, national, and global processes of literary canonization and shows the short story to be a major genre of postcolonial literature and central to the formation of the new woman. I have an enduring interest in the relationship between gender and genre and the popular and the literary, which informs my ongoing work on the comparative study of Indian and world literatures, translation studies, and women’s writing in South Asia.
Selected Publications:
Forthcoming. “What Was So New about the New Story? Modernist Realism in the Hindi Nayī Kahānī.” Comparative Literature.
Forthcoming. “Literary and Popular Fiction in Late Colonial Tamil Nadu,” in Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Anwesha Maity, and Aakriti Mandhwani. London: Routledge.
Forthcoming. (with Aparna and Vinay Dharwadkar) “The Playwright and the Stage,” translation in A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1860 to the Present. Ed. Aparna Dharwadker. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
2016. “Feminine Desire is Human Desire: Women Writing Feminism in Post-Independence India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 36 (1): 21-41.
2015. “Don’t you know Sita?,” critical introduction to and translation of R. Chudamani’s “Citaiyait Teriyuma?” SAGAR: A South Asia Research Journal 23: 111-127.
2010. “In Premchand’s Home,” introduction to and translation of selections from Shivrani Devi’s Premchand Ghar Mein in Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom. Ed. Shobna Nijhawan. Delhi: Permanent Black.
AMESALL Courses (Present and Future):
Introduction to the Literatures of South Asia
Women Writers of South Asia
Introduction to Translation Studies
Gender, Nation, and Literature in South Asia
Love in South Asia
Crossroads: Classical Literatures of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia
Introduction to Postcolonial Theories
Rutgers Academic Building