About
Surabhi Balachander earned her B.A. in English and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and is currently a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examines the nature of rurality as an identity as represented in American literature from 1920 to 2020, the United States’ first century as a majority-urban country. Relying on comparative ethnic studies and ecocritical approaches, Surabhi argues that rurality cannot be cleanly defined and rather must be negotiated in combination with other, especially racial and ethnic, identities, as well as in relationship with physical environments. At the University of Michigan, Surabhi has taught first-year writing and upper-division literature courses covering topics such as rural America, Asian American fiction, and literature and the environment. She serves as the coordinator of the Rural America Working Group at UM and as the graduate representative on the board of the Western Literature Association, for which she recently edited a special issue of Western American Literature. Surabhi also has a keen interest in questions of allyship, accountability, and racial solidarity, and, with Jeremy Glover, has received grant funding to pursue a joint book project on these topics.
