Vanita Reddy
Associate Professor
Department of English
Women’s and Gender Studies
College of Liberal Arts
Vanita Reddy specializes in South Asian diasporic literatures and cultural production, 20th and 21st century multi-ethnic and postcolonial literatures, visual and material cultures, fashion and beauty, transnational feminist thought and queer theory, and critical race studies. Reddy’s current research puts scholarship in comparative race studies into conversation with recent work in feminist and queer cultural studies of affect and intimacy in order to examine political possibilities and limitations for anti-imperial, cross-racial political alliances between racialized populations. Ultimately, this research seeks to de-center heterosexual and male genealogies of cross-racial alliance.
Reddy will use the Arts and Humanities Fellowship to travel to several archives in Canada, the UK, and the US for her current book project based on this research, Global Intimacies. Global Intimacies examines cultural production from the global South Asian diaspora—North America, East Africa, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean—in relation to black and indigenous populations.
In addition to the book-length monograph, Global Intimacies, Reddy will publish one chapter of her research as a journal article and present her research findings at several national and international conferences. She will upload selected research findings to an online, open-access humanities database to promote scholarly exchange in the emerging field of comparative race studies. Finally, she will hold a one-day public symposium at Texas A&M on scholarly and creative approaches to cross-racial solidarities.
Reddy has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, Contemporary Literature, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. More recently, she has published articles in the Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (2017) and The Feminist and Queer Theory Reader (Oxford UP, forthcoming). She is also the co-editor with Anantha Sudhakar of a special issue of “The Scholar and Feminist Online: Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations” (March 2018).
Reddy’s latest book, Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture, was published by Temple University Press in 2016.