Bakirathi Mani: Brief Biography
My research on South Asian diasporas is shaped by a personal narrative of migration. I was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) and raised in Tokyo, both global cities. Growing up in Japan, I attended the International School of the Sacred Heart, and was part of a multicultural expatriate community. I came to the United States in 1992, as an undergraduate student at Georgetown University. It was during my time studying international relations that I first began to encounter literature and film produced by South Asians from the U.S., U.K., East Africa and Southeast Asia: the excitement of reading and writing about this body of work has stayed with me for a lifetime. Between 1995 and 1997, I lived in New Delhi, working towards a master's degree in modern Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University. My research focused on indentured labor migration from colonial India to the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1997, I moved to San Francisco to begin my doctoral research in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. For more than a decade, my intellectual concerns have centered on the ways in which diasporic subjects create new forms of belonging in the modern world.
I currently teach Asian American studies, transnational feminist theory, and cultural studies of globalization at Swarthmore College. I also continue to travel frequently between the U.S., Japan, and India, and make my home in Philadelphia.
You can read my views on globalization and literary studies in my Last Collection address to Swarthmore’s graduating class of 2008.
