Rovel J. Sequeira is a doctoral candidate in English and in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a Harry Ransom Center Dissertation Research Fellow in 2019 and is currently a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. He is completing his dissertation project, The Nation and its Deviants: Sexuality, Science, and Fiction in Colonial India (1880-1950), on the colonial histories of sexual science and literary forms in turn-of-the-20th century India. His work on the global histories of queer and transgender politics, the history of science, and literary modernisms in the post/colony is forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and Modernism/modernity. He was named a Dean's Scholar in 2018-19 for his interdisciplinary literary-historical research in English, Hindi, and Marathi. 

Sequeira has taught an advanced junior research seminar on the "Sexual Drives of Colonialism and Fascism" in the English department and co-taught "Introduction to Queer Studies" in the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program. He also co-organized the graduate working group Latitudes studying issues of race, empire and postcolonialism at UPenn from 2016-18. He will also serve as Graduate Associate for the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies program at Penn over 2021-22. 

Before arriving at Penn, he worked in Dijon teaching English as a second language to native French speakers at a vocational school, and interning at the Indian independent publisher Queer Ink! He completed his M.A. degree in English at St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi (2014) and his B.A. (Hons.) degree in English at St. Xavier's College, University of Mumbai (2012)