Rituparna Mitra
Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Dr. Rituparna Mitra is a postcolonial scholar whose teaching and research interests are interdisciplinary, covering comparative literatures of the Global South, trauma and memory studies, environmental humanities, and literary urbanisms.
Her book, Entangled Traumascapes: Landscape, Ecology, and Politics in Post-Partition South Asian Literature, under contract with Oxford University Press, connects literary trauma studies with ecological thinking to explore how violence and displacement unfold within more-than-human experiential and sensory landscapes. Her research also considers cities of the Global South from the perspective of liveability and futurity in the Anthropocene.
Dr. Mitra’s work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Postcolonial Studies and The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, as well as edited collections. She is currently co-editing a Special Issue on “Global South Ecologies” for Modern Fiction Studies. Dr. Mitra is also part of a team at Emerson College that has won a National Endowment for the Humanities Planning Grant to develop an interdisciplinary major focused on sustainability communication.
She was chair of the executive committee of the Global South Forum (Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies) of the Modern Language Association (2024-25), participates in the Working Group of the South-South Forum at Dartmouth College, and is a member of the Association of Literary Urban Studies.
Courses
- First-Year Honors Seminar 1
- Postcolonial and Indigenous Environments
- Topics in Global Literature
- American Women Writers
- Post-Colonial Cultures
- Honors Writing Symposium
- First-Year Honors Seminar 2
Academic Work
- Forthcoming monograph, Entangled Traumascapes: Landscape, Ecology, and Politics in Post-Partition South Asian Literature (under contract with Oxford University Press).
- Forthcoming, "Anita Desai," Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Gender and Women's History, Ed. Amanda Capern.
- Forthcoming, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Global South Ecologies, eds. Pashmina Murthy and Rituparna Mitra, special issue, Modern Fiction Studies.
- 2024, “’A Powerful Sense of Inhabitance’: Lyric, Memory and Enduring Community in South Asia,” Narratives of Loss and Longing: Literary Developments in Post-Colonial South Asia, Eds. Nukhbah Taj Langah and Roshni Sengupta, (Routledge, 2024), 41-61.
- 2023, “Representing Postcolonial Urban Change: Recursive infrastructures and Forms of Liveability in Tram 83,” in Representing Urban Change Beyond Gentrification, eds. Hanna Henryson and Davy Knittle, special issue, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (July 2023): 75-93.
- 2021, “Precarious Duniyas in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Life, Death, and Repair in Ruin-Worlds,” in Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory in the Era of the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman), eds. Amit R. Baishya and Priya Kumar, special issue, Postcolonial Studies21, no. 4 (December2021): 380-398, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.2018775.