Dr. Kalpana Hulluru is a Professor in the Department of English, Pondicherry University (PU), Puducherry, India. She strongly believes that literature provides critical thinking skills that will help students/scholars to live life meaningfully. Her strengths are strategic approaches to teaching mixed groups of students and innovative teaching methods. She has successfully completed three research projects with an ongoing SPARC project. She has many awards and fellowships to her credit. A few notable ones are the USA’s ‘Study of Institutions Award’ (2007) and the SICI’s ‘Faculty Mobility Grant’ (2016). She was an invited keynote speaker for the Open National Science Day (2018) at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. She has to her credit several publications and has contributed a chapter on the Tamil language Classic, Silappadikaram to A Companion to World Literature (Wiley, 2019). She is an able research guide and is recognized as an outstanding teacher at her institution.
At Metropolitan State University, Denver, CO, Kalpana, besides teaching upper-division Literature courses, would offer courses on Women’s Writing and Feminism that would be cross-listed with the university’s Gender Institute. As part of the outreach, she would be delivering the annual Gandhi Memorial Lecture sponsored by Denver Sister Cities International and also interact with high school students at the Denver Centre for International Studies. Further to teaching and outreach programs, she intends to research Asian American Children’s literature concerning gender. By the end of her stay, she hopes to develop an MoU between the universities to link online courses, foster student-scholar exchanges and initiate collaborative research.