Ranu Samantrai (Email; phone 812-855-2834)
Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D.: University of Michigan, 1990
A.B.: Smith College, 1984

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Post-WWII English literature and culture, especially Black and Asian-British Studies. Twenthieth-century cultural theory: critical theory, poststructuralism, and post-Marxism. Postcolonialism, feminist theory, cultural studies.  

Click here for further information regarding Professor Samantrai's work in 20th Century Literature and culture.

PARTIAL LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation ( Stanford University Press, Cultural Sitings series, 2002).

Interview with Gretchen Helfrich, Odyssey, Public Radio International, WBEZ, Chicago, August 5, 2004.

“Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World,” Meridians: Feminism Race, Transnationalism 4.2 (Fall 2004): 164-91.

“The Intrusion of Difference,” Smith Alumnae Quarterly (Winter 2002/03): 97-99.

“Continuity or Rupture? An Argument for Secular Britain,” Social Text 64 (Fall 2000): 105-21. To be reprinted in World Secularism after the Millenium, ed. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Duke University Press, forthcoming).

“Claiming the Burden: Naipaul’s Africa,” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (Spring 2000): 50-62.

“The Conditions of Democracy: Pluralism, Conflict and Crisis,” Studies in International Relations XXIV (Vienna, 1999): 49-58.

“Weapons of Culture: Collective Identity and Cultural Production,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 14 (Tübingen, 1998): 131-48.

“On Being the Object of Concern,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 9.1 (1997): 49-53.

“States of Belonging: Pluralism, Migrancy, Literature,” Essays on Canadian Writing 56 (1995): 33-50. Reprinted in Writing Ethnicity: Multiple Geographies and Cross-Cultural Consciousness in Canadian and Québécois Literature, ed. Winfried Siemerling (Toronto: ECW Press, 1996), 33-50.

“‘Caught at the Confluence of History’: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Necessary Nationalism,” Research in African Literatures 26.2 (1995): 140-57.

SAMPLES OF RECENT TALKS:
“Justice without Truth: The Problem of Disciplinary Uncertainty,” California Center for Cultural and Social Issues and the International and Intercultural Studies Program, Pitzer College, February 2005. “Policing Community in the Diaspora,” Conference on “Materializing India: Media, Globalization and Gender,” Indiana University, February 2005.

“Who needs the Subaltern?” Symposium on “Theorizing Scriptures,” Institute for Signifying Scriptures, the Claremont Graduate University, February 2004.

“An Aesthetic of Conflict: The Subject of Collectivity,” Symposium on “Other Europes/Europe’s Others,” the Kahn Institute, Smith College, March 2002.

Round Table on “Religious Violence, Secular Violence,” American Studies Association, Hartford, October 2003.

“Blackness as Communal Allegory,” International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, Birmingham University, England, June 2000.

“The Conditions of Democracy: Pluralism, Conflicts and Crisis,” International Roundtable on “Civilizations: Conflict or Dialogue?” University of Innsbruck, Austria, June 1998.

PARTIAL LIST OF AWARDS
Center for the Arts and Humanities, Indiana University, 2005-06

George and Romy Kozmentsky Faculty Fellow, Claremont Graduate University, 2002-03

Rockefeller Fellowship, Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1994-95

PARTIAL LIST OF COURSES TAUGHT
Graduate Courses:
Introduction to Cultural Studies
Postmodernity and Politics
Race and Representation
Critical Race Theories
Contemporary Feminist Theories
Intellectual History of Feminist Theory
Advanced Research in Cultural Studies
Imagining England: Twentieth Century British Fiction

Undergraduate Courses:
Post-WWII British Literature
Feminism and Postcolonialism
Fiction as Cultural Criticism
Literature of Exile
Contemporary African Fiction
Women and Literature