Gaiutra Bahadur
email: gaiutra.bahadur@rutgers.edu
Gaiutra Bahadur is an associate professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Department of English. She is an essayist, critic and journalist who writes often about literature, history, memory, migration, and ethnicity. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Boston Review, Dissent, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Lapham’s Quarterly and many other publications across the globe.
Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the British literary award for artful political writing. It won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book about the Caribbean in any language from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2014. The Chronicle of Higher Education included the book in its round-up of the best scholarly books of the decade in 2020. Her creative nonfiction, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Rebecca Solnit’s literary atlas to New York City Nonstop Metropolis and the Feminist Press collection of Asian American creative writing Go Home!
She is a two-time winner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose and has won literary residencies at MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. She has also been a research fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the University of Cambridge, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, among others.
Professor Bahadur collaborated with poet and translator Rajiv Mohabir to recover the only known text by an indentured immigrant in the Anglophone Caribbean, a songbook by Lal Bihari Sharma first published as a pamphlet in India in 1915. Mohabir’s English translation, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, was published in 2019 with an afterword by Bahadur, who first encountered the text in the British Library while doing research for Coolie Woman.
Before winning a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, the country’s most prestigious mid-career fellowship for journalists, she was a newspaper staff writer. She covered immigration, courts and the war in Iraq for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Texas legislature and state government for The Austin American Statesman. She started her career as a consumer advice columnist for The Jersey Journal in Jersey City, her hometown newspaper. The Nieman Fellowship was in reward for her decade’s work for those daily newspapers.
She has served as a judge and nominator for numerous literary awards, including the PEN/Jean Stein Award for Literary Oral History and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and has taught creative nonfiction at the University of Basel in Switzerland and Caribbean literature at City College of New York. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN America and the Asian American Writers Workshop.
