Sreyashi Ray

I am an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow in environmental humanities at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media with a minor in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. I specialize in 20th and 21st century global anglophone literature, South Asian vernacular literature and film, postcolonial studies, animal studies, and ecocriticism. My current book project is based on my dissertation titled Postcolonial Zoopolitics: Interspecies Relations in South Asian Literary and Visual Cultures. It examines how representations of human-animal relations in literature, film, and mixed-media artwork focused on the postcolonial Indian subcontinent reconfigure the intersecting discourses of species, race, class, sexuality, hospitality, and labor across their enmeshed local and global contexts. 

My dissertation research has received grants from the University of Minnesota’s Environmental Humanities Initiative Graduate Fellowship, Rose Travel Fellowship for Creative Research in Asia, Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship, and AMES Graduate Fellowship. I was recently awarded a Best Graduate Student Essay Prize ( Honorable Mention) by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) for my paper "Insurgent Plants: Reclaiming Postcolonial Indian Forests as Multispecies Commons." I have been awarded teaching excellence certificates for dedication to student learning by the University of Minnesota's Center for Educational Innovation. My research has been published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies,  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Humanimalia, and Edge Effects.

Contact: rayxx356@umn.edu

My preferred pronouns are she/her.