Texas Tech University

Faculty Profiles

Director of Comparative Literature

Dr. Yuan Shu

Yuan Shu (Ph.D. Indiana), is an associate professor of English and director of Asian Studies Program at Texas Tech University. His research interest includes transpacific American studies and globalization theory, technology and discourse, as well as critical and comparative race studies. He has published essays in journals varying from Cultural Critique to MELUS. He has co-edited two essay volumes, American Studies as Transnational Practice (Dartmouth College Press, 2015) and Oceanic Archives and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). His current project, Empire and Cosmo-politics: Technology, Race, Transpacific Chinese American Writing is under revision for a university press. He is also editing a special issue on "World Orders and Geopolitics of the Transpacific" for Verge: Studies in Global Asia's (7.1). He served as a US Fulbright scholar teaching and researching at the National University of Singapore from 2017 to 2018.

Faculty in Comparative Literature

Dr. Kanika Batra

Kanika Batra (Ph.D. Loyola University Chicago, 2006), director of graduate studies in English and the interdisciplinary Comparative Literature program specializes in Postcolonial literature and has interests in Feminism and Queer Studies. Her articles have appeared in the journals African and Black Diaspora, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. In 2001 she published a book-length study of Caribbean poetry for the Indira Gandhi National Open University, India. In 2011, she published the book Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Postcolonial Counterpublics.

Dr. Curtis Bauer

Curtis Bauer (Ph.D. Texas Tech, 2009) specializes in Creative Writing/Poetry and Translation. His areas of interest are American and World Poetry, Poetry and Fiction in translation, chapbook publishing, and letterpress printing. His collection of poems, Fence Line, won the 2003 John Ciardi Poetry Prize; his second collection, The Real Cause For Your Absence, was published by C & R Books in 2013. His poems, prose, and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Rivendell, The Southern Review and Ninth Letter, among others. He has received poetry and translation fellowships from the Resedencia Roquissar in Mallorca Spain, the Vermont Studio Center, and he has been a Lannan Writer in Residence at IAIA in Santa Fe. He is the publisher of Q Ave Press Chapbooks, an editorial board member and the Spanish Translations Editor for From The Fishouse, and the Emerging Spanish Poets Series Editor for Vaso Roto Editions.

Dr. Nesrine Chahine

Nesrine Chahine (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) specializes in modern Arabic literature in its global relations to European and non-Western cultural histories. Her book project, Marketplaces of the Modern, examines representations of Egypt as a marketplace in texts by twentieth-century Egyptian and Anglophone authors, arguing that unresolved narrative tensions over the commodification of laboring bodies, cultural artifacts, and raw goods reflect the troubled history of metropolitan influence in twentieth-century Egypt. The project engages debates on transnationalism and globalization by emphasizing the necessity of recuperating the material dimensions of culture. Her translation of selections from Ahmad Shawqi's Death of Cleopatra has appeared in the Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and she is currently in negotiations with the American University of Beirut Press for the publication of a trilingual volume in an anthology series on Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writer's Union.

Dr. Roger McNamara

Roger McNamara (Ph.D. Loyola University Chicago, 2010) specializes in Postcolonial literature, with an emphasis on South Asian and African fiction. His research interests include Cultural Marxism and Postcolonial Theory. He has published articles on South Asian writing, and he is at present working on a book project that explores the impact of secularism on the aesthetics of writers belonging to racial and ethnic minority groups in South Asia.