FACULTY & STAFF

Ambreen Hai
Associate Professor

Send E-mail

Office: Wright Hall 212

Phone: 585-3311

Ambreen Hai earned a B.A. in English, philosophy and economics from Wellesley College and an M.A., M.Phil and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Professor Hai teaches literature of the British empire, Anglophone postcolonial literature from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and 20th century critical theory. She also serves on the board of the Program in the Study of Women and Gender and teaches their core introductory course. She has published articles on Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Salman Rushdie and Bapsi Sidhwa, among others, in various scholarly journals such as English Literary History, Literature Interpretation Theory, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature and Meridians.

Professor Hai's book Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Ohio University Press, 2009), examines how, in the context of colonization, an anxiety about their own agency shapes colonial and postcolonial narratives, and why that anxiety is manifested through the imagining of the text as a human body. It focuses on the work of Kipling, Forster, and Rushdie, but extends it argument to include writers such as Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, Grace Nichols, Michelle Cliff and Shani Mootoo.