COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Ishan is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies program with a home department in Asian Languages and Cultures. He was also a Gender and Sexuality Studies Teaching Assistant (2023-24) and a fellow in the Public Humanities Graduate Practicum (2022-23). He will be a Franke Fellow in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities for the 2025-2026 academic year.

His dissertation project, Dispersed Relations: Caste, Communalism, and Women Writers in South Asia (1950-2020), looks at a set of contemporary women writers in the Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Anglophone public spheres. It traces how writers such as Amrita Pritam, Alka Saraogi, Geetanjali Shree, Zakia Mashhadi, and Annie Zaidi use tropes of unfulfilled love and friendship across boundaries of caste and religion to mediate the failures of the nation-state in upholding a “secular” polity. Critiquing literary, constitutional, and architectural idioms of communal harmony, the dissertation attempts to reimagine politics beyond fantasies of nationalist integration. His general research interests include psychoanalytical literary and film criticism, queer theory, religious studies, postcolonial theory, and translation studies. His academic and collaborative writing has appeared and is forthcoming in Mapping Friendship (ed. Shilpa Phadke, Nithila Kanagasabai, and Himalika Mohanty, Routledge), Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence (ed. Nishi Pulugurtha, Routledge India 2022), Gender and History, and South Asian Review.

Prior to joining Northwestern University, Ishan worked at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University, conducting workshops for students across colleges, and facilitating research on feminist media studies. Before that, he was a part of the Young India Fellowship and received a BA (Hons.) in English from the University of Delhi.

Ishan has also actively worked to organize conferences, reading groups, and film screenings on issues of indigeneity, trans politics, sexuality, and Hindu nationalism, working with campus organizations such as The Subcontinent Project. Along with Soumya Rachel Shailendra, he runs a public humanities initiative called Translators’ Adda, a series of workshops on South Asian literature and languages in the Chicagoland area.