COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Soumya Rachel Shailendra is a PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies with a home department in Asian Languages and Cultures. She holds a Mellon Cluster fellowship in Comparative Race and Diaspora Studies. Located at the intersection of Black studies and memory studies, Soumya’s research interrogates the affective structures of caste by studying the sonic and formal registers of lamentation and mourning rituals in twentieth century African American and Dalit literatures. Soumya’s project draws on the transnational and transracial solidarity between the Black power and anti-caste movements of the early 1970s to examine the “inner-life” of caste as represented in Dalit and African American writings. She is also interested in Dalit epistemologies, liberation theologies, decolonial thought, and the Black radical tradition. She is proficient in Hindi, Marathi, and Malayalam.

Soumya has earned a B.A in Literature and Drama from Bennington College, Vermont. She also studied at Middlebury College through the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges exchange program. She was one of the founding student members of the Bennington chapter of the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education (CFMDE). She worked as a dramaturg for Bennington College’s Spring 2019 production of Sarah Gancher’s The Place We Built. She has previously interned with the MANOA journal at the University of Hawai’i Press. Her writings have appeared in Europe Now Journal, The Indian Express, and the student-run (m)othertongues journal.