Tamara Bhalla is Associate Professor and Chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is also an affiliate faculty with Asian Studies and the Language, Literacy and Culture PhD program. Her research and teaching center on Asian American studies, with particular expertise in South Asian American literary and cultural studies. She also researches social practices of reading and contemporary book clubs.
She is the author of Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community (University of Illinois Press, 2016), and her scholarship has appeared in Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History; Journal of Asian American Studies; MELUS; Scholar and Feminist Online; and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture. Her current book project, Race and Readership in Contemporary U.S. Literature, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. From 2023–2026, she is serving as Co-Principal Investigator on the Mellon Foundation Global Asias Initiative grant, which fosters connections between Asian American and Asian Studies at UMBC with a focus on public humanities.
Selected Publications
Book
- Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community. University of Illinois Press, Asian American Experience Series, November 2016
Articles
- “Asian American Literary Reception and Readership.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press, July 2019.
- “The True Romance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess” Scholar & Feminist Online, 14.3, 2018.
- “Being and Feeling’ Gogol: Gender, Authenticity, and the Possibilities of Literary Interpretation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake” MELUS, Spring 2012.
Courses
- AMST 200: What Is an American?
- AMST 365: Asian American Fictions
- AMST 375: Studies in Asian American Culture
- AMST 464: Immigration Nations: Examining Narratives of Immigration to the US
- AMST 490: Senior Seminar