Shwetha Chandrashekhar is an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Anglophone Literature in the Department of English at the University of South Dakota. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Her current research looks at the emotional and political lives of debilitated postcolonial subjects and the affective dynamics of power, labor, and violence in the late-twentieth- and twenty-first- century literary, cinematic, and cultural representations of South Asia and its diasporas.

Her scholarly articles and reviews have been featured in or is forthcoming in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature (2025), Critical Inquiry (2024), South Asian Review (2023, 2024, and 2025), South Asian History and Culture (2023), and Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History.