Pallavi Rastogi

Professor
Ph.D., Tufts University

Biography

Dr. Pallavi Rastogi is a full professor and the J.F. Taylor Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where she teaches classes on global Anglophone literature, postcolonial theory, and postcolonial popular culture. Her first book, "Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa," was published by Ohio State University in 2008. Dr. Rastogi's second book, "Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century," was published by Northwestern University Press in April 2020. In March 2024, she published a co-edited collection with Dr. Nalini Iyer, "Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature" (Modern Languages Association). She is currently working on "Asians on the Third Coast: Other Races, Other Cultures in Louisiana," a co-edited book with Dr. Madoka Kishi, which is under advanced contract with LSU Press.

Dr. Rastogi’s other editing projects include special issues of the journal “South Asian Review,” "Writing South Asia in Disastrous Time" with Meghan Gorman DaRif and Liam O’Loughlin (2023), and "Precarities, Resistance, and Care Communities in South Asia" (2018). She has also published many articles on South African, South Asian, and South Asian diasporic literature, as well as on multiethnic British and American literature, in various journals and anthologies.

In 2015, Dr. Rastogi co-produced the prize-winning film "Peace Haven" and contributed to its subtitles. She has won multiple university awards, such as the LSU Faculty Distinguished Award, the LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award, the English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) Outstanding Faculty Award, the Tiger Athletic Foundation Award for Undergraduate Teaching, and the LSU Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award for Graduate Teaching. She was awarded the Louisiana ATLAS grant (2021-2022) for her third monograph, “Other South Asias: The Indian Subcontinent Through Different Eyes.” In January 2027, she will serve as chief editor of “The South Asian Review.”

Area(s) of Interest

Postcolonial Theory and Literature; South Asia and South Asian Diaspora Studies; Global Anglophone Studies; Asian American Studies; British Empire Studies; Disaster Studies; Twenty‑First Century Studies; Multiethnic British and American Literature, Critical Ethnic Studies, Victorian Literature.