Rashi Rohatgi

Dr. Rohatgi’s research is focused on questions of genre, theorizations of World Literature, and the intersection of translation and religious studies. Her publications include explorations of labor diaspora literature (“Coolitude and Hinduism in the Indian Labour Diaspora” in Religion and Otherness in South Asian Literature and Film) and uneasy heteroglossias (“Postcolonial Hindi Translation in Mauritius” in Matatu), and she is currently engaged in the first Hindi-to-English translation of Abhimanyu Unnuth’s labor uprising novel Lal Pasina. Her 2014 book, Fighting Cane and Canon: The Case of World Literature in Literary Mauritius, concentrates on the works of seminal Indo-Mauritian novelist and poet Abhimanyu Unnuth; it explores the way in which literatures which tried to travel, but didn’t, fit alongside the more mobile works which have begun to form the World Literature corpus. Current research includes comparative studies of Mauritian and Norwegian genre fiction, about which she presented at the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association, and questions of labor in post-colonial adaptations of the Ramayana. She serves as Fiction Editor at the journal of contemporary literature Boston Accent Lit, where she convenes the Accent Prize for Emerging Women of Color Writers. She also reviews poetry for academic and literary journals including Africa in Words, where she organized a semester-long focus on new poetry from the continent and diaspora, and Wasafiri, the journal of contemporary international writing. Her own creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction can be found in Lunar Poetry, The Toast, and The Misty Review, among others.