PAMLA 2025, San Francisco, California.

My first book project, Minoritarian Feelings: South Asian Unpleasantness in the Contemporary Global Novel (in progress), revitalizes the intersections between postcolonial studies, affect studies, novel studies, and gender and sexuality studies to reimagine agitation, envy, vengeance, exhaustion, melancholia, mourning, and pessimism in the context of the Partitions, liberal humanitarianism, majoritarian nationalisms, and unsustainable developmentalism in South Asia and its diasporas in Canada, England, and the United States. Minoritarian Feelings features close examinations of works by Tahmima Anam, Gemini Wahhaj, Mirza Waheed, Anuk Arudpragasam, Indra Sinha, Mohammed Hanif, Jamil Jan Kochai, Uzma Aslam Khan, and Arundhati Roy. I put forth unpleasantness as a dynamic politico-affective concept and argue that contemporary global novels on South Asian pasts and presents mobilize the ambiguities and contingencies of negative feelings and locate them in the domain of the ordinary to reveal the continuum between everyday and extraordinary violence.

My research has been supported by: University of South Dakota’s College of Arts & Sciences, and UMass Amherst’s World Studies Interdisciplinary Project-Decolonial Global Studies Mellon Summer Dissertation Fellowship, Research Enhancement and Leadership Fellowship, College of Humanities and Fine Arts Summer Dissertation Fellowship, and Interdisciplinary Studies Institute Fellowship.