Rovel Sequeira is a doctoral candidate in English, with an affiliation 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 politics, the history of science, and literary modernisms in the post/colony is forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 

He 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 was a co-organizer of the graduate working group Latitudes studying issues of race, empire and postcolonialism at the University of Pennsylvania from 2016-18. He was named a Dean's Scholar in 2018-19. For his interdisciplinary research, he was awarded the Phyllis Rackin Graduate Award in the Humanities and the Leboy-Davies Graduate Award for feminist research in the Health Sciences by the Alice Paul Center at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Before arriving at Penn, he spent a year in Dijon teaching English as a second language to native French speakers, 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)