New Faculty Profile: Sandhya Shukla

Sandhya Shukla

Associate Professor Sandhya Shukla comes to the department this year with a highly interdisciplinary approach to her research and teaching in English and American Studies. Literary studies increasingly lends itself to conversations in neighboring academic disciplines like history, philosophy, anthropology, political science and even psychology, and effective contributions to strengthening the ties between these fields requires a certain ease and familiarity with the disciplinary intersections of current scholarly trends. With a BA from Cornell University and both an MA in African American Studies and PhD in American Studies from Yale University, Professor Shukla began her career in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and then spent several years in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University before joining our department at the beginning of this fall semester.

Working mainly from an interdisciplinary perspective on conceptually diverse theories of race and ethnicity in largely cross-cultural contexts, Professor Shukla conceived, developed, and wrote India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England, which saw publication in 2005. This work considers the construction of nation and nationality in South Asian diasporic communities in both the United States and England and how these broadly conceived yet culturally specific ideas are built, broken down, and reconstructed again from both inside and outside the perspective of South Asia. She questions how “nation looks in various cultural forms” via literature, film, art, and any other culturally salient material manifestations of identity in its broadest, and simultaneously narrow, definition. Professor Shukla pays particular attention to how communities of “Little Indias” function within the boundaries of their current geographic and cultural location within the United States and England, but she also considers how these Little Indias bear transnationally significant effects as they maintain strong material and culturally consumptive ties with the South Asian subcontinent. Her conclusions, suggestions and theories produce a dialogue between, around and about the fractures and intersections that this hybridization of national identity generates.

In what Professor Shukla calls the “globalness of difference,” she realizes that she can expand her initial discussion of India and consider how social spaces, enclaves similar to Little Indias, become parts of a larger cross-cultural exchange—sites of communication, fluidity, and friction.  Her current project focuses on Harlem’s transformative social spaces and how this community’s increasingly permeable borders create sites of continuous exchange, but they have subsequently become sites of intercultural tension, conflict, and intimacy. Through the “stories Harlem tells about itself” and the “stories Harlem tells to others,” Professor Shukla investigates how this significant New York City neighborhood is defined and how, through historically and culturally representative ways, this social space has been given meaning by those who inhabit it.

Her highly interdisciplinary perspective on these culturally relevant ideas of nation, nationality, race, and ethnicity push back the boundaries of American Studies in general, and serves as a way to turn the U.S.-centric gaze outward and beyond the borders of our own particular social space, and Sandhya extends this vision to her classroom. During the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 academic years, she has been teaching the foundational courses in the American Studies program for undergraduates. The first semester’s course, entitled “Cultures of Empire,” and the second semester’s course, “Cultures of Cosmopolitanism,” introduce students to the interdisciplinary approaches to American Studies and, in Sandhya’s words, “encourage them to open up their conception of  ‘America,’” and to imagine the “symbolic and geographic constructions of national borders.” In the English department, Professor Shukla currently teaches an upper-level undergraduate  seminar called “Cultures of South Asian Diaspora,” that maps out several methods for reading and understanding what can comprise “South Asianness” by investigating a range of representative texts: prose-fiction, poetry, histories, films, music, and critical discourses. 

Next year, Professor Shukla will begin to teach the department’s graduate students in a course entitled “Critical Theories of Space, Time and Encounter.” Throughout this course, the graduate students will engage with and explore the ongoing dialogue between the fields of history, anthropology, geography and literary studies in works by contemporary authors like Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Mike Davis, Gillian Rose, Franco Moretti and Elizabeth Grosz. Additionally, Professor Shukla will teach the undergraduate course “Cross-Cultures of Harlem,” a reflection and response to her current intellectual captivations with the production and cross-cultural transportation in, around, and of Harlem.