Rate My Professor Tamara Bhalla

Tamara Bhalla is Associate Professor and Chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. Bhalla is an affiliate faculty member in Asian Studies and the Language, Literacy, and Culture PhD program. Her research and teaching center on Asian American studies, with particular expertise in South Asian American literary and cultural studies, as well as social practices of reading and contemporary book clubs. She is the author of Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community Book Clubs (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her scholarship has appeared in Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, Journal of Asian American Studies, MELUS, Scholar and Feminist Online, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture. Bhalla's current book project, Race and Readership in Contemporary U.S. Literature, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. She also co-authored her dissertation, Between History and Identity: Reading the Authentic in South Asian Diasporic Literature and Community (University of Michigan, 2008).

From 2023 to 2026, Bhalla serves as Co-Principal Investigator on the Mellon Foundation Global Asias Initiative grant, which fosters connections between Asian American and Asian Studies at UMBC through public humanities initiatives. She teaches courses including AMST 200: What Is an American?, AMST 365: Asian American Fictions, AMST 375: Studies in Asian American Culture, AMST 464: Immigration Nations: Examining Narratives of Immigration to the US, and AMST 490: Senior Seminar. In 2021-2022, she received the Marilyn E. Demorest Award for Faculty Advancement in recognition of her advocacy for faculty and dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Key publications include “Me Time”: Motherhood, Reading, and Myths of Leisure (Reception, 2023, with L. DiCuirci), “To Understand the Other, You Have to Be a Mother: Jenna Bush Hager’s #ReadWithJenna Book Club and the Politics of Race, Empathy, and Motherhood” (Reception, 2024), “The Privilege of South Asian American Studies” (Journal of Asian American Studies, 2022, with P. Dhingra), “Asian American Literary Reception and Readership” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2019), “The True Romance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess” (Scholar & Feminist Online, 2018), and “Being (and feeling) Gogol: Reading and recognition in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake” (MELUS, 2012).