Debotri Dhar

Research and Teaching interests: Feminist theories; South Asia, India; epistemology; culture; race; post-colonialism; transnational feminisms; gender violence, law, and the state; women's education; literature and women’s writing; love; gender and religion; policy; interdisciplinary methods.

Affiliation(s): Women's and Gender Studies Core Faculty; International Institute; Center for South Asian Studies Faculty; Center for the Education of Women (CEW+); IRWG Faculty Affiliate

Academic awards, honors, judging and evaluation: Invited Expert Panelist, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships; Invited Reviewer, National Women’s Studies Association Conference; Invited evaluator, Indian Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship; Judge, Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund for writers (New York); Center for the Education of Women Jean Campbell visiting scholarship (U-M); IDF Grant, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (U-M); Excellence Doctoral Fellowship (Rutgers University); Linda Rothman teaching award in Women’s Studies; South Asian Studies research award; Institute for Research on Women Graduate Fellowship; Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar (Boston University).

Courses taught: Feminist Thought; Women and Well Being in Literature (cross-listing with English: Literature and Culture); Sexual Violence and the State: Global Perspectives; Literature and Politics; Women, Culture, Society; Transnational Feminisms; The Gendered Body; Doing Feminist Research: Theory and practice; Gender and Representation: Narratives of the Nation; Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies; Gender and Bollywood; Knowledge and Power: Issues in Women’s Leadership; Feminist Leadership and Community Engagement.

Publications: Dr. Debotri Dhar has published over fifteen peer-reviewed scholarly articles and book chapters on the gendered intersections of society, economy, literature, polity, and pedagogy such as “Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in a Feminist Classroom: An Intersectional, Transnational Perspective” in Feminist Formations; “Teaching Culture in a Globalized Era: Strategies from a Postcolonial Feminist Classroom” in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy; “Feminist Agency, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Desire in Anita Nair's novels” in Postcolonial Text; and “Feminist Pedagogy and Humanitarian Education” in Education and Gender.

Dr. Dhar's new monograph on sexual violence, the postcolonial state, and socio-economic aspects of law and justice is forthcoming from Routledge (London, New York, New Delhi.) She has also edited, and written critical introductions to, interdisciplinary volumes of original papers such as Education and Gender (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) and Love is Not a Word: The Culture and Politics of Desire (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2020), and co-edited Education in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands (London, New York, Sydney, New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 

Debotri also writes novels, short stories, essays, and newspaper columns on themes that shape, and are shaped by, her scholarly interests. Postcards from Oxford, her single-authored book of stories on women and travel, was published in London and Kolkata in 2013, her novel The Courtesans of Karim Street (2015) was shortlisted for a Young Writers' Award, her short stories have appeared in literary magazines in USA, UK, India, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere, and her long story “A Flute Called Radha” was published in a 2019 Penguin Random House anthology. She was invited to judge and guest-edit The Best Asian Short Stories (Kitaab, Singapore), a global contest for creative writers in/from Asia and the Asian diaspora. Her monthly column “An Indian Abroad” in The Sunday Guardian from New Delhi was popular, and her literary essays such as “A Sense of Belonging,” on Indian-American women writers, in OPEN Magazine have received thousands of circulations worldwide.

Conferences, Public Talks, and Policy Engagements: Dr. Dhar has consulted with international organizations and non-profits on policy issues pertaining to education, gender, literature and culture. She has also delivered over 25 papers, invited presentations, and talks at universities such as Yale, Princeton, Harvard, UPenn, Boston, Michigan, Delhi, Oxford, Rutgers, Bonn and elsewhere, while also giving educational talks such as at the British Council and in other non-university settings accessible to a wider public.

Additional notes: Dr. Dhar is the founder of the Hummingbird Global Writers’ Circle, a transnational “travelling” literary initiative to foster a love of books and ideas, cultural exchange, and global understanding through free community readings. Her other interests include Indian classical music, cinema, painting, and the culinary arts.