Kavita Daiya

Kavita Daiya is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as the former director (2018-2021) of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at GWU. In Spring 2021 she founded and served as the first director of the Immigration and Migration Studies Micro-Minor in CCAS. Professor Daiya’s scholarship is poised at the intersection of South Asian Literature and Visual Culture, Asian American Literature and Film Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Transnational Feminisms. She has written several peer-reviewed articles on South Asian literature, South African literature, South Asian American literature, Gender Studies, Bollywood films, and transnational cinema, and two books. Her first monograph was published in the United States and India: "Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India" (Philadelphia: Temple UP, [2008] 2011; New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013). Her second monograph focuses on mid-twentieth century migration as it shapes the cultural negotiation of secular citizenship and minority experience and is called "Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in Postcolonial India and the Diaspora" (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2020; New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2021). She has also edited a collection of essays entitled "Graphic Narratives from South Asia and South Asian America: Aesthetics and Politics" (Routledge, 2019). Her articles and reviews have appeared in edited volumes as well as journals like: PMLA, Genders, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, American Book Review, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of South Asian History and Culture, among others. Her scholarship dwells on the negotiation of violence and migration in a range of sites in the public sphere, with a sustained commitment to how gender and sexuality shape the narratives of ethnicity, migration, and rights she works on. Kavita Daiya received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Chicago. She serves on the Dean’s Council at GWU. She has also been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, and a Fellow at the Globalization Project at the University of Chicago. She has been invited to present her work at the US State Department, University of Chicago, Georgetown University, Amherst College, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, Brandeis University, Lehigh University, the University of Hyderabad, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of Michigan, among others. Her research has been presented at national and international conferences of the MLA, Association for Asian American Studies, American Studies Association, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Oral History Association, and the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, among others. She was a member of the Founding Board of Directors of the 1947 Partition Archive (2014-2021), a collaboration with Stanford University, with offices in the US, UK, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Daiya’s research has been generously supported by the NEH, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and George Washington University’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies and Global Women’s Institute. In AY 2015-2016, Professor Daiya held the visiting NEH Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Albright College, where she organized faculty development seminars and symposia focusing on Globalization, Migration Studies, and Asia. She was the Andrew W. Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum (2014-2015, 2012-2013). She is a former M.A. Program Director in the English Department (2010-2014). Professor Daiya also serves as Affiliated Faculty in the Global Women’s Institute, the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, the Sustainability Program, and the Peace Studies Program. She was the Associate Editor (Book Reviews) of the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal South Asian Review (Taylor and Francis) from 2012-2018. She currently serves as an elected member of the Dean’s Council. She has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, and a Fellow at the Globalization Project at the University of Chicago.