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 and a Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania (2012-2013).  She is also the Director of the M.A. program in English and an Executive Committee Member of the Women's Studies Program.  Her research and teaching interests include Postcolonial Literatures and Theory, Asian American Literature, Transnational Feminisms, Bollywood Cinema, Visual Culture, Race and Diaspora. She teaches a range of interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate courses on Postcolonial and Feminist Theory, Transnational Cinemas, Asian/Pacific/American Literature and Culture, Twentieth century British Literature and Empire.  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 National Culture in Postcolonial 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; Yoda Press, Indian edition, forthcoming).  Her second book project focuses on embodied secularism, refugees, narratives of citizenship and violent migrations.  She has also published several articles, co-edited a special issue "Imagining South Asia" of the South Asian Review, and has been invited to present her work at the University of Chicago, Georgetown University, Amherst College, University of Maryland and the University of Michigan, among others. 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 fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania, 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. She also serves as Associate Editor for the South Asian Review.  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.