Texas Tech University

Bhawana Pillai

Research Areas and Interests: comparative literature, life writing studies, global Anglophone literature, gender and globalization, women's writings from MENA and South Asia, transnational feminisms, diaspora and exile, political resistance and imprisonment, women's prison memoirs, factory women's stories, ethnographies of globalization, graphic memoirs, Afro-Asian solidarities. 

I study women's contemporary life writings from Middle East, North Africa and South Asia in forms such as prison accounts, ethnographies, graphic and diasporic memoirs using theories of gender and globalization. Life accounts by women affiliated to a range of class, race, and religion based majoritarian and minority identities from these regions complicate broad labels such as the ‘Arab woman' or ‘South Asian woman'.  I read women's personal narrations of poverty, religious and gender violence in the context of transformations brought by the global spread of right-wing religious nationalisms, growth of weapon markets, prison-industrial complex, and offshore industrialization in these Global South regions. Even as global capitalist forces under the guise of offering neoliberal freedoms exploit and augment non-Western women's traditional social and economic vulnerabilities, women's life stories when compared across these regions help forge transnational feminist links and networks of individual and collective resistances to global and local capitalist alliances.

M Phil | University of Delhi | English

MA | University of Delhi | English

BA | University of Delhi | English

Peer Reviewed Book Chapter

2022: “Muslim Women Re-membering the Nation, Writing their Transnational Selves in Diasporic Memoirs: Sara Suleri's Meatless Days and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage from Cairo to America—A Woman's Journey.” Muslim Women's Writings from across South and Southeast Asia. Edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran, Routledge, 2022. pp. 276-290. [ISBN: 978-1-032-16323-9] DOI: 10.4324/9781003248064 

Peer Reviewed Article

“Kashmiri Muslim Women's Resistance Politics in Anjum Habib's Prisoner No.100: An Account of My Days and Night in Indian Prison” (Manuscript under progress). 

Research Awards and Fellowships

Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship, TTU 

J.T. and Margaret Talkington Fellowship, TTU

Pulla Malla Nanda Akkaraju Scholarship, TTU

Humanities Center Travel Grant, TTU

Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Fellowship, Five Colleges, Amherst. 

Teaching Award

Outstanding Advanced Instructor for First Year Writing 

 

 

 

 

 

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PhD in Comparative Literature, Globalization and Translation 
Email: bhawana.pillai@ttu.edu