Shwetha’s first book project, Unpleasant Genres: Conflicting Feelings and Minoritarian Characters in Postcolonial South Asia (in progress), revitalizes the intersections between postcolonial studies, affect studies, genre studies, and gender and sexuality studies to reimagine agitation, envy, vengeance, exhaustion, melancholia, mourning, and pessimism in the context of neoliberal capitalism, liberal humanitarianism, majoritarian nationalisms, and unsustainable developmentalism in South Asia and its diasporas in Canada, England, and the United States. Through a comparative study of novels and films, she puts forth unpleasantness as a dynamic politico-affective concept and argue that contemporary texts on South Asian pasts and presents mobilize the ambiguities and contingencies of unpleasantness and locate it in the domain of the ordinary to reveal the continuum between everyday and extraordinary violence.

She is also working on her second book project, In Strange Worlds: Unbelongingness in Post-1945 Literature and Cinema, which analyzes writers such as Zoë Wicomb, Teju Cole, Ling Ma, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Dur e Aziz Amna and filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Daniel Kwan, Chloé Zhao, and Asghar Farhadi and provides an unique affective and aesthetic paradigm to think about national, linguistic, and cultural alienation.

Shwetha’s research has been supported by: UMass’ 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, Interdisciplinary Studies Institute Fellowship.