Asha Nadkarni

Asha Nadkarni is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her B.A. in Gender and Women's Studies from Connecticut College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University.

Prof. Nadkarni’s research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminist theory, U.S. empire studies, and Asian American studies, with an emphasis on the literatures and cultures of the South Asian diaspora. Her book, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation.

Prof. Nadkarni is working on a second book project, tentatively titled From Opium to Outsourcing, that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context.