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Avni Sejpal

I am a third-year PhD student in English at Penn, where I am also pursuing a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. My work lies at the intersections of postcolonial literature and theory, the twentieth and twenty-first century novel, Marxist literary criticism, gender and sexuality studies, and histories of Third World decolonization and Cold War Afro-Asia. I also convene Latitudes, the English department working group for race, empire, and the study of the Global South.

Previously, I have worked in independent and scholarly publishing, nonprofit media, and public archives at Boston Review, the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), and elsewhere. I hold a BA in English from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, and an MA in English from Villanova University. In 2021-22, I received the John Louis Haney Fellowship at Penn.

Articles and Book Chapters

"Waving at Trains" Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson (University Press of Mississippi) (2023)
"The Absurd Apocalypse: An Interview with Arundhati Roy" Evil Empire (MIT Press/Boston Review) (2018)

Courses Taught

fall 2023

fall 2021