Kulvinder Arora
Phd, Literature, University of California, San Diego
Office : 1222 UH (MC 360)
Phone: 312.355.4368
E-mail: akulvin@uic.edu
(Bio)
Kulvinder Arora is trained in English and American Literature and researches American
and Diasporic cultures. In her intellectual training, she has been influenced by work at the
intersections of American Studies, Gender Studies, Postcolonial and Diasporic Studies.
Increasingly, she believes that disciplinary boundaries need to expand and intersect to
create knowledge about populations that are otherwise ignored within narrow
understandings of disciplines. She began her graduate training studying British
Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Studies. She became an “Americanist” because
she wanted to understand immigrant literary formations in the United States throughout
the twentieth-century. This was largely because she wanted to understand her own history
as well as the histories of former immigrants who paved the way for recent minorities.
Her dissertation is called “Assimilation and its Counter-Narratives: European American
and South Asian Immigrant Narratives to the Unites States.” In the dissertation, she
compares and contrasts how United States immigrant writers have explored the idea of
immigrant assimilation and alternative forms of immigrant adaptation involving social
justice. She was particularly interested in how these immigrant groups narrated their
experiences with education and religion over the twentieth century. The groups she
studies are European-Americans in the early twentieth century and South Asian
immigrants in the late twentieth century. In noting the similarities and differences
between these groups, she is interested in how racial and gendered identities are
negotiated over time and space. She is currently working on revising the chapters of her
dissertation into a book. In it, she examines the rationale for comparing these two groups
and the legacies they leave for future immigrants.
She loves teaching at UIC in Gender and Women’s Studies because it is an
interdisciplinary department and this allows her to explore the intersection of gender with
many other subjects in her classes. She has taught classes called “Women and Film,”
“Human Rights and Gender” and “Global Perspectives on Women and Gender.” Her
teaching philosophy involves making education relevant to students by validating their
own experiences and realities. She feels enriched by the grounded perspectives UIC
students have to offer.
Her activism involves promoting education as a powerful force by extending knowledge
of gendered issues. She was honored to serve as the Director for the “Model World
Conference on Women and Girls’ Rights,” a day long event at UIC in which high school
students from Chicago propose and debate resolutions to improve women and girls’ lives
across the world.
Publications:
Arora, Kulvinder “That Diasporic Something: Strategic Syncretism in Funkadesi’s Sound and Vision”
(Article Pending).
Arora, Kulvinder “The Mythology of Female Sexuality: Alternative Narratives of Belonging”
Women: A Cultural Review 17: 2 (Summer 2006).
Arora, Kulvinder “Mapping Religion, Culture and Education in the Production of South Asian Immigrant
Space,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 5:2 (Fall 1998)