Prof. Shalini Puri has a PhD from Cornell University and is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests span postcolonial, Caribbean, gender, and memory studies; indentureship, slavery, and incarceration; environmental humanities; and social movements. She is especially interested in interdisciplinary and fieldwork-based humanities methods that explore the intersection of the arts, everyday life, and social justice.
Prof. Puri co-founded the Pitt Prison Education Project. She is the author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. She has co-edited Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South and several other books. She also edits Palgrave Macmillan’s New Caribbean Studies series. Currently, she is working on a book titled “Poetics for Freshwater Justice”.
As part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Puri is collaborating with scholars at Ashoka University to explore how a comparative study of the Caribbean and India can reframe postcolonial studies and build enduring mechanisms for south–south exchange. The specific foci of the collaboration is research, teaching, advising, and capacity building to facilitate a cross-regional study of migration, environmentalisms, and water justice using the lens of literature and interdisciplinary humanities.