(AMES 3636) "South Asian Women Writers” 

This upper-level writing-intensive course offers a unique perspective on the complexities of South Asian cultures and histories through women's writing by focusing on how women have explored issues of cultural identities, religious communities, and national belonging in predominantly male literary traditions across different periods. While paying close attention to women writers' sociopolitical relevance and positionality within national and regional literary canons, this course examines the interrogations of neoliberal developmentalism, environmental justice, religious fundamentalism, and feminist pedagogies in their writings. This course also highlights the diverse aesthetic strategies that writers implement to represent women's interior lives and produce new models of feminine subjectivity and autonomy. The assigned readings are instructive for understanding how fictional and nonfictional narratives offer new meanings about the exchanges between private and public spheres in postcolonial South Asia. Through lectures, discussions, assessments, and interactive pedagogical exercises, students learn how texts can be interpreted as testimonies of women's initiatives to rewrite histories and reconfigure gender-specific roles in contemporary South Asian societies. In addition to close reading of texts written in English alongside vernacular texts in translation, the course integrates critical theories on gender and sexuality to foster meaningful dialogue between creative and stylistic interventions. 

(AMES 3637W) "Modern Indian Literature” 

This upper-level writing-intensive course introduces students to significant moments and major themes in modern literature of the Indian subcontinent and their intersection with global intellectual histories. As the Indian subcontinent is a vast region consisting of diverse and multicultural literary traditions, this course is not an exhaustive survey. Instead, this course focuses on key moments in modern Indian literary cultures to understand what constitutes 'modernism' and 'modernity' across multiple regional cultural contexts. The texts are chosen from geopolitical spaces and linguistic realities across the Indian subcontinent to provide a comprehensive, comparative understanding of South Asian multilingualism. Topics covered by the assigned texts include (but are not limited to) postcolonial interrogations of language, nationalism, gender and sexuality, caste, religion, environment, and economic infrastructures. The course focuses on multiple authors, literary debates, aesthetic movements, and genres within the canons of South Asian literature written in English and non-Anglophone regional languages. These writings familiarize the students with the wide-ranging cultural milieu of South Asia and various threads of the region's sociopolitical and historical developments.