COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Reavant Singh (Any/All) is a PhD student in the Comparative Literary Studies program, with a home department in Asian Languages and Cultures. They are a Mellon Cluster fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Their research interests lie at the intersection of cinema studies, performance studies, South Asian nationalist and leftist movements, and critical caste studies. They are broadly interested in the caste-inflected discourses on respectability and sexuality that regulate the labor of women performers at both the center and peripheries of South Asian cinema. 

They graduated from University of Southern California with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and English. Their undergraduate thesis examined literary and cinematic representations of the Bombay film ecosystem between the 1920s - 1950s, with a particular focus on the literary and cinematic work of the Progressive Writers’ Association. As an undergraduate research assistant, they contributed to the translation of Yashpal’s Manushya Ke Roop, a project that is still ongoing.