Contact
Email
Location
W335 South College

Faculty Bio

Asha Nadkarni received her B.A. in Gender and Women's Studies from Connecticut College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University.

Professor Nadkarni’s research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminist theory, US empire studies, and Asian American studies, with an emphasis on the literatures and cultures of the South Asian diaspora. Her book, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She is working on a second book project, tentatively titled From Opium to Outsourcing, that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context.

Research Areas

  • 20th Century and Contemporary Literature
  • American, Atlantic, & Hemispheric
  • American Literature, Asian American & Asian Diaspora
  • Colonial, Postcolonial, & Transnational Studies
  • Critical Race and Ethnicity
  • Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • Marxist Literary Studies
  • Theory and Cultural Studies

Publications

  • “Outsourcing, Terror, and Transnational South Asia,” Flashpoints in Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy Schlund-Vials (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2017).
  • “Transnational Feminism,” Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory, ed. Eugene O’Brien (New York: Oxford University Press, July 2017).
  • "The South Asian American Challenge," Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, eds. Rajini Srikanth and Min Song (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
  • Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
  • “Reproducing Feminism in Jasmine and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” Feminist Studies, 38.1 (Spring 2012): 215-241.
  • “‘World-Menace': National Reproduction and Public Health in Katherine Mayo's Mother India,” American Quarterly, 60.3 (September 2008): 805-827.
  • “Eugenic Feminism: Asian Reproduction in the U.S. National Imaginary,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , 39.2 (Spring 2006): 221-244.

Courses Recently Taught

  • English 204: Introduction to Asian American Literature 
  • English 300: No Place Like Home: Women Writers of the South Asian Diaspora 
  • English 300: The Nation Writes Back 
  • English 491: Transnational Feminist Literature 
  • English 891: Postcolonial Bodies 
  • English 891: Transnational Feminism