Poulomi Saha

Candidate statement

Poulomi Saha is Assistant Professor of English at UC-Berkeley and is author of An Empire of Touch: Female Political Labor & the Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia UP, 2019). Affiliated faculty in the Program for Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender, and in the Designated Emphasis in Women and Gender Studies, she teaches courses in ethnic American literature, postcolonial studies, and gender and critical theory. Her research spans eastward and forward from the late 19th-century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power and domestic race relations in the 20th. She is currently at work on a new book, Fascination: America’s Hindu Cults, that looks to how Indian spirituality has long enthralled an American public imagination and fundamentally shaped its racial and spiritual self-conception.

If elected to the board, Poulomi looks forward to helping to enrich existing and build new ties between studies of Asian America and questions of empire. In particular, she hopes to support and develop institutional and intellectual projects that unsettle the historical and disciplinary norms that have hived Asian American and postcolonial studies from one another. As more work and teaching in Asian American studies turns transnational and imperial, it is imperative that we engage collaboration and interdisciplinary scholarship at those interstices.