COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Shamini Kothari is a PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies. They are interested in the intersections between identity, affect and visual-literary culture. Their focus lies in questions surrounding power, caste and sexuality through the sensory in popular culture. Shamini holds a Masters in Sexual Dissidence from University of Sussex and had four years of teaching experience at Ashoka University with courses ranging from 'Family and Kinship', 'Intimacy and Image' and 'Food in Literature and Cinema.' She is also the co-founder and former member of Ahmedabad, Gujarat's queer-support group called 'Queerabad'. She has previously presented at various conferences including the Queer Asia conference at SOAS with a paper on the visual politics of graphic novels in India and at the Excess: Critical Femininities conference at York U. on ambivalent femininities and their negotiation in Indian Cinema. Their aim at Northwestern continues to be to learn across media and engage with these questions through a grounded, context sensitive research methodology that hopefully trouble fixed frameworks of gender and sexuality in South Asia at large.