Rate My Professor Rahul Gairola

Rahul K. Gairola serves as the Krishna Somers Senior Lecturer in English and Postcolonial Literature within the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Murdoch University, where he is also a Fellow of the Indo-Pacific Research Centre. He holds a joint Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, Film, and Media Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, along with qualifications from the University of Cambridge Faculty of English, Cornell University School of Criticism and Theory, and Digital Humanities certificates from the University of Oxford, University of Victoria, and Leipzig University. Gairola joined Murdoch University in 2018 through an endowed position funded by generous donations. His prior appointments include faculty roles at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, City University of New York Queens and York Colleges, Yale University, University of Cambridge, and Leipzig University.

Gairola's research specializations encompass postcolonial and queer literatures, digital humanities, South Asian cultural studies, diasporic formations, and intersectional gender dynamics concerning home and belonging. He has authored or edited seven books, including the single-authored Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), co-authored Migration, Gender and Home Economics in Rural North India (Routledge, 2019), and co-edited South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations across Technology’s Cultural Canon (Routledge, 2020), Memory, Trauma, Asia: Recall, Affect, and Orientalism in Contemporary Narratives (Routledge, 2021), Performing Identity in the Era of COVID-19 (Routledge, 2023), and Liminal Diasporas: Contemporary Movements of Humanity and the Environment (Routledge, 2024). With over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, such as Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? to Deepa Mehta's Fire (Comparative Literature, 2002) and A theory and pedagogy of anti-colonial Q-mapping (Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2022), he has shaped discourse in his fields. Gairola edits the Routledge/Asian Studies Association of Australia South Asia Book Series and serves as Area Editor for Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. He earned the Murdoch University College of Arts, Business, Law and Social Sciences Learning and Teaching Award in 2020 and has delivered lectures at University of California Berkeley, King’s College London, University of Delhi, and others.