Postdoctoral Lecturer, Department of English, UT Austin
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ABOUT ME
Amrita Mishra is a Postdoctoral Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her Ph.D. in August 2020. As a graduate student she was a recipient of the UT Graduate School's competitively awarded Continuing Fellowship for her final year of dissertation writing. She earned her B.A. in Physics and English at Cornell University in 2012. Her book project, Oceanic Entanglements: Race, Gender, and Fantasies of Freedom in Narratives of Indian Indentured Labor, explores literary representations of Indian indentured labor in contemporary postcolonial fiction alongside the colonial archive. In analyzing indentured labor in relation to slavery and foregrounding the urgency of Afro-Asian "entanglements" between diasporas in the Caribbean, and between the British colonies of India and British West Indies, this research sits at the interstices of British imperialism studies, diaspora studies, critical race studies, and material history. At UT, Amrita has been trained in the Ethnic and Third World Literatures concentration, which privileges anti-colonial resistance movements and Marxist theories of decolonization over and above the cynicism of orthodox postcolonial theory
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Amrita's work has been published in Tabula Rasa, SAGAR: A South Asian Research Journal, and the E3W Review of Books. She has an article forthcoming on the plantationocene in The Global South and a reflective piece on the precarity of graduate students of color forthcoming for a special issue of Women, Children, and Families of Color. Her public essay, "The Patronus Paradox: Dispelling the Dementors of Graduate School," co-authored with Noah Weisz and Chienyn Chi, is currently under review. Outside research and teaching, Amrita enjoys cooking, vintage shopping, and shuttling between her two homes, India and the US.
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Amrita has seven years of teaching experience, and has independently taught a range of composition and literature courses at UT on Asian diasporic, African diasporic, Caribbean, and global Anglophone literatures. Before graduate school, Amrita was a Teach for India Fellow in Bombay and taught 4th, 6th, and 7th grade in underprivileged schools across subjects. She has also been a writing consultant for two years at UT's University Writing Center for undergraduate and peer graduate students to help through ideation, organization, and revision processes.
Amrita's academic "transgressions" across silos of knowledge and teaching in part inspired her to co-found a graduate student group, the Global South Collective, in 2018. The group, in part inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's conception of the "academic undercommons," was designed to create community and networks of support amongst precarious bodies in the academic institution. Alongside a few main members of the collective, Amrita co-organized a national conference at UT, "Fugitive Futures: Graduate Students of Color Un-Settle the University," that focused on the experiences of marginalized graduate students and featured Dr. Saidiya Hartman as the invited keynote speaker. In addition to conference organizing, she has three years' editorial experience with English Department's annually published E3W Review of Books; she was the managing Senior Editor in 2018-9.
