Preeti Singh is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College where she is affiliated with the department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages. She researches and teaches postcolonial studies and world literature with a focus on 20th and 21st century South Asian and South Asian diasporic literatures and cinema. Broadly, she is interested in literary expressions of political and social crises at the intersection of decolonization and the global cold war, discourses of human rights, and the contemporary rhetoric and theories of populism.
Preeti received her PhD in English from Ohio State University-Columbus in August 2022. Her book project is based on her dissertation titled, Postcolonial Exceptions: Cultural Lives of the Indian National Emergency (1975-1977) which examined literary and cinematic representations of the widely memorialized national emergency declared by Indian prime-minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. Reading across a range of genres— novels, theatre, cinema, and political cartoons, Postcolonial Exceptions, scripts a literary and cultural history of postindependence India through the prism of the ‘Emergency.’ Her second project tentatively titled The Comparative Poetics of Decolonization theorizes decolonization as a planetary phenomenon with specific attention to the aesthetics of alignment, solidarity and indigeneity. The project traces the relationship between indigeneity and refuge as it has shaped the intellectual history of Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies.
Preeti completed her M.A. and M. Phil degrees at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India where she wrote an M.Phil. dissertation on urban form and postcolonial subjectivity in the emerging genre of the Indian graphic novel. At Dartmouth, Preeti is the co-convenor of the South Asian Studies Collective. She is also one of the principal investigators on the project Infrastructures of Race, Knowledge, and Aesthetics funded by the Leslie Center’s Venn Vision Grant.