Professor Ghosh’s research focuses on displacement aesthetics in Asian American and Postcolonial Studies, interrogating how themes of displacement, diaspora, migration, immigration laws, new materialisms manifest in literary forms and disrupt questions of identity, culture, ethics, alterity, and nationhood.
With a background in Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies, she comparatively studies Asian American texts, across a variety of Asian American ethnicities to investigate how these ethnicities represent their unique experiences of displacement across generations, migration waves, and political events to formulate their identities and rights in diaspora, in their families, and set them apart from other ethnicities. Such issues are at the center of her first book manuscript “Displaced Lives”, that identifies an Asian American consciousness privileging experiences of displacement that have historically identified Asian Americans as foreigners and aliens. Her ongoing research project on “Soil and Nationalism” situates Asian Americans in the continuum of transnational marginalization both before and after migration by examining how the materialism of soil manifests in literary works.
Professor Ghosh’s passion for issues of displacement, migration, and social justice starts from her family’s history of migration from Bangladesh to India, before the Indian Partition of 1947. Literature became a way for knowing and comprehending the unspoken, silenced, and marginalized experiences that were not passed down even in intimate family narratives of the great move. Her research privileges displacement based on the premise that family and national histories of migration dictate attitudes towards family, finances, identity, and other interpersonal attitudes.
Professor Ghosh has taught widely in Ethnic Studies programs in multiple schools in the U.S., and is committed to designing classes that are inclusive, nurturing of diversity, differences, and which promote belonging. She has offered literature courses with community engagement projects that engage, and professionalize students through applied work in the humanities. In her spare time, Professor Ghosh loves to volunteer for numerous causes, run, hike, explore local food scenes, and travel.
