Kavita Daiya
Biography . Research . Teaching . Talks & Publications . Links & Networks
Kavita Daiya is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English at George Washington University, in Washington DC. She is also Executive Committee Member of the Women’s Studies Program. Her research and teaching interests include Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Colonial Discourse, Transnational Feminism, South Asian American Literature, Bollywood Cinema, Visual Culture, Race and Diaspora. She teaches a range of graduate and undergraduate courses on Postcolonial and Feminist Theory, Transnational Literature and Film, twentieth century British Literature. Dr. Daiya’s interests are interdisciplinary, seeking to explore cultural representations in various media, in relation to historical, theoretical and anthropological accounts of colonial and postcolonial experience, in India, South Asia, and around the world.

Dr. Daiya received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Chicago in 2001. Engaging the field of feminist postcolonial studies with Asian American studies, her first book Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and Postcolonial Nationalism in India examines the cultural negotiation of ethnic violence and mass migration in South Asian literature and cinema, from the diaspora and the subcontinent (Temple University Press, 2008). Her second book project focuses on the memories and experiences of migration, and she is currently in India conducting video interviews with those who migrated during the Partition. She has also published several articles, and has been invited to present her work at the University of Chicago, Georgetown University, Provisions Library, and the University of Michigan, among others. In addition, her research has been presented at national and international conferences like the MLA, AAS, the Annual South Asia Conferences at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, among other spaces. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford in England and a Research Fellow at the Globalization Project at the University of Chicago. Dr. Daiya is a member of Indus Women Leaders.

Dr. Daiya’s research has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the University of Chicago, and George Washington University. Apart from her book, her publications include articles on questions about immigrant experience, masculinity, globalization, refugees, women, and anti-colonial nationalism in South Asia, the United States and Africa. Not only because she was born and brought up in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, Dr. Daiya continues to take an active interest in cultural and political debates there on ethnic violence, community and gender identities, contemporary art, cinema, urban development, globalization, and cultural nationalism.