Bakirathi Mani

photo of Bakirathi-Mani in front of trees
Bakirathi Mani

Visiting Scholar in Race and Ethnicity in America, CSREA, Fall 2021 Professor of English Literature, Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College profile

Bakirathi Mani is Professor of English Literature and Coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (Duke University Press, 2020) and Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her current research examines an archive of family photography mapping migration from India to Japan, the Middle East, and the U.S. from the mid-twentieth through the twenty-first centuries. A scholar of Asian American studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist and queer of color studies, Mani is also a curator of Asian American visual cultures, working with artists and non-profit organizations in Philadelphia and nationwide.  Her work on South Asian diasporic public cultures has been published in American Quarterly, Social Text, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Diaspora, Positions, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, among other venues. Mani earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University, her M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and her B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University.