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Rovel Sequeira

2022 Ph.D. Graduate
Dissertation Advisor(s): Ania Loomba
"The Nation and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India, 1870-1950"

LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

I am an LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I am currently writing up my book, The Empire and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India, on the colonial histories of sexual scientific and literary forms and idioms of sexual subjectivity in turn-of-the-20th century India. My work from and beyond the book project on the global histories of queer and transgender politics, the history of science, and literary modernisms in the post/colony has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Modernism/modernityGLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, History of the Human Sciences, and Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activisms.

I graduated with a PhD from Penn English (with a focus on Postcolonial and South Asian Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies) in 2022. During my time at Penn, I was also the Graduate Associate of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. In 2018-19, I was named a Dean's Scholar for my interdisciplinary literary-historical research in English, French, Hindi, and Marathi. I taught courses ranging from a junior research seminar on the "Sexual Drives of Colonialism and Fascism" in the English department to an "Introduction to Queer Studies" in the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program. I also co-organized the graduate working group Latitudes studying issues of race, empire and postcolonialism at Penn from 2016-18.

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

 

Courses Taught

fall 2019

GSWS 003.601 Intro to Queer Studies  

spring 2019

spring 2018

fall 2017

GSWS 002.001 Gender and Society  

spring 2017