Rovel Sequeira
Dissertation Advisor(s): Ania Loomba
"The Nation and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India, 1870-1950"
Assistant Professor and LSA Collegiate Fellow of Women's and Gender Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
I am an Assistant Professor and LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and a faculty affiliate in the Center for South Asian 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/modernity, GLQ: 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)