Tamara Bhalla is an associate professor and chair of American Studies and affiliate faculty in the Asian Studies program. Professor Bhalla’s research focuses on the social, cultural, and community-building uses and values of multiethnic literatures. Other research interests include Asian American and South Asian American literary and cultural studies, Afro-Asian feminisms, ethnic American reading communities, and literary reception.
Professor Bhalla teaches both introductory and upper-level core courses in the American Studies department on Asian American literature and culture, multiethnic literatures and cultures, and post-1965 narratives of immigration to the United States. She received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan.
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