turns attention to East Bengal, the historical antecedent of Bangladesh, today an international exemplar of development driven by gender-targeted foreign aid. It recounts a new narrative of female political labor under empire, spanning from anticolonial nationalism to neoliberal globalization, through text and textile. It follows the historical traces of how women have claimed their labor, making what has been customarily seen as “merely” intimate and domestic into appreciable political acts. (Columbia University Press, 2019; South Asia Imprint: Penguin Random House, 2019)
2020 Winner of the Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association for outstanding first monograph.
2017 Winner of the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize from the ACLA.