Dr Priyanka Tripathi

Visiting Research Fellow
Dr Priyanka Tripathi

Dr Priyanka Tripathi - orcid.org/ 0000-0002-9522-3391

Visiting Research Fellow, April - June 2023

Home Institution: Indian Institute of Technology Patna

Priyanka Tripathi is an Associate Professor of English and Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna (India). She is also the Co-Executive Editor of Journal of International Women’s Studies, an online, open-access, peer-reviewed feminist journal published by Bridgewater State University. She has published extensively in Gender, Place & Culture; Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction; South Asian Popular Culture; Minnesota Review; National Identities; Indian Literature; Journal of Gender Studies; Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics; GeoHumanities; Economic and Political Weekly amongst others. She has also worked on several sponsored (both government and non-government organisations) projects related to several socio-cultural aspects with a primary focus on gender issues: Re-storying Widowhood: The (In) Visible Lives of the Bastuhara Nari of Varanasi (sponsored by JIWS); Digitisation and Archiving of Cultural History of Bihar: A Case Study of Madhubani Art (sponsored by Vishlesan I-Hub Foundation at IIT Patna); In Search of Agency and Self: Mapping Gendered Conjugal Violence in Diasporic Diegesis (sponsored by the AHRC-Funded Diaspora Screen Media Network, Birmingham City University); and Mapping Domestic Abuse and Violence in the time of COVID-19: A Study from Bihar (sponsored by Indian Council of Social Science Research). Her forthcoming monograph with Bloomsbury is titled The Gendered War: Evaluating Feminist Ethnographic Narratives of the 1971 War of Bangladesh. Her areas of academic interest include Gender Studies, South Asian fiction, GeoHumanities, and graphic novels.

Project Title: Optimizing Caste Intersectionality: A Decolonial Reading of Gender-based Violence in Select Subaltern Fiction in India 

The transnational representation of marginalized women concerning intersectional politics has constantly fallen short of including ‘caste’ as a component of the analysis. Within the politics of intersectionality in feminism, the emphasis has always been on class, religion, race, ethnicity, and so on. The context of India hammers down the nuances of caste hard. For optimizing the outcome of academic interventions, it’s crucial to renegotiate the terms of analysis. To redress the global narrative of gender-based violence from the perspective of postmodern feminism, this research intends to locate the caste question in select subaltern fictions in India. And further, to address its significance as resistance against brahminical patriarchy and upper-caste feminist recalcitrance within a decolonial framework.