Deepika BahriProfessor and Department Chair

Deepika Bahri is Professor and Chair of English at Emory University. She specializes in postcolonial and world literature, Frankfurt School critical theory, race, culture, postcolonial theory, political aesthetics and philosophical discourses of utopia and the good life. She has allied interests in the medical humanities and human health. She also serves as the director of the interdisciplinary program in Global and Postcolonial Studies.

Her publications include Postcolonial Biology: Psyche and Flesh after Empire (Univ of Minnesota Press, 2017); Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (Univ of Minnesota Press, 2003); 3 edited books; and over 30 articles and chapters, among them Why Stories about Illness Matter, The Lancet (May, 2022), “Gendering Hybridity: The Womb as Site of Production in Globalization.” Interventions (2019), and "Hybridity Redux." PMLA (Jan. 2017). Native Intelligence models a variety of readings that arise from an understanding of aesthetic form as neither incidental nor merely ornamental, but as central to the ideological and political content of postcolonial literature.

Postcolonial Biology uses theories of neurobiological plasticity, embodied cognition, and epigenetics to explore the impact of imperial domination on colonized bodies and minds, and their ongoing transformation in today’s global order. Moving beyond “North/South” thinking, the book power examines questions of power over life and lifeways in the relay from colonialism to a late-capitalist, consumption-driven world under new forms of empire in all societies.

She has developed an extensive Postcolonial Studies Web site available at: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/. In 2010 she curated the academic exhibition, Salman Rushdie: A World Mapped by Stories which launched Emory’s archive of Rushdie’s papers and born digital material at the Rose Library.

Her current project, Anger, a Modern Biography, explores the relationship of emotions, justice, and the good life in the public sphere.

• Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers (MLA, 2021)
  
• Postcolonial Biology (UofMNP, 2017)
• Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature. (UofMNP, 2003)
• "Empire and Racial Hybridity." Special Issue of South Asian Review. 2006.
• Editor, Realms of Rhetoric: Inquiries into the Prospects for Rhetoric Education. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2003.
• Editor, Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996.
• Partners in Prevention: AIDS Prevention and Control in Tamil Nadu. USAID/CDC, 2002 .pdf format. Published as AIDS Prevention: It Works. Chennai: APAC/USAID, 2002.