Amrita Dhar

I grew up in Calcutta and studied at the universities of Jadavpur (India), Cambridge (UK), and Michigan (USA). Before coming to UC San Diego, I taught at The Ohio State University.

I study and teach courses in early modern literature, disability studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, migration studies, and the environmental humanities. I am also a climber and mountaineer, and work and write on world mountaineering literatures.

As a scholar of literature and as a mountaineer, I am deeply invested in understanding embodiment, difference, and even as I use it, the tool that enables me to think about these and much else: language.

As a teacher, I am fiercely invested in my students’ intellectual growth and well-being.

I have written on a range of topics, including blind poetics, theatre and disability, premodern critical race studies, social justice pedagogy, Shakespeare adaptations and caste, teaching race and migration, the colonial/postcolonial Renaissance, Miltonic legacies in nineteenth-century Bengali literature, and mountain travel writing. This work has been supported over the years by large grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the School of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University, and the Academic Senate of the University of California San Diego.

My first monograph project is entitled Milton’s Blind Language and Disability Poetics. It is a study of the workings of blindness towards the making of seventeenth-century English poet and polemic John Milton’s poetic language in his years of partial and complete loss of sight.

I am also the Director of the Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies Project, which hosts a series of open-access digital interviews with leading postcolonial Shakespeareans from around the world.

Pronouns: she, her

Languages: Bengali, Hindi, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish

Articles & Book Chapters

• “They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Write, or, How Milton Read Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey 77 (2024), pp. 147-157
• “Shakespeare, Race, Postcoloniality: The State of the Fields,” Shakespeare Survey 77 (2024), pp. 235-243 (co-authored with Jyotsna Singh, Jessica Chiba, and Christopher Thurman)
• “Two Nations, Both Alike: Shakespeare in Bengal,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 16.1 (2024), pp. 1-30 (co-authored with Amrita Sen) LINK
• “On Shakespeare, Anticolonial Pedagogy, and Being Just,” in Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in US Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts, edited by Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), pp. 23-43 LINK
• “Madhusudan’s Miltonic Epic, The Meghnādbadh kābya” in Milton Across Borders and Media, edited by Angelica Duran and Islam Issa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 143-160
• “Shakespeare, Race, and Disability: Othello and the Wheeling Strangers of Here and Everywhere,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, edited by Patricia Akhimie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 171-192 LINK
• “When They Consider How Their Light Is Spent: On Intersectional Race and Disability Theories in the Classroom” in Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, edited by Anna Wainwright and Matthieu Chapman (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2023), pp. 161-186 LINK
• “The Invention of Race and the Postcolonial Renaissance,” Book Forum article, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (2022), pp. 132-138 LINK
• “On Teaching Im/Migration in an Undergraduate Classroom,” Radical Teacher 120 (2021), pp. 61-68 LINK
• “Confessions of the Half-Caste, or Wheeling Strangers of Here and Everywhere,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 11.2 (2020), pp. 212-219 LINK
• “Travel and Mountains” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, edited by Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 345-360 LINK
• “Toward Blind Language: John Milton Writing, 1648-1656,” Milton Studies 60:1-2 (2018), pp. 75-107 (recipient of the Milton Society of America’s Albert C. Labriola Award) LINK
• “Seeing Feelingly: Sight and Service in King Lear” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 76-92

Shorter Creative Work

• “Happy New Year,” Alpinist 84 (2023), p. 42
• “A Story Told in Mountains” in Moving Arts: Enduring Impressions, edited by Stuart Bell (London: The 87 Press, 2021), pp. 45-51
• “Two pitches in Red Rocks, Nevada,” Alpinist 72 (2020), p. 47

Book Reviews

• “Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye,” Review of English Studies 75.”  LINK
• “Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability by Genevieve Love,” Renaissance Quarterly 75.3 (2022), pp. 1092-1094 LINK
• “On Shakespeare and Postcolonial Thinking: Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory by Jyotsna Singh,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 34.1 (2021), pp. 61-63 LINK
• “Disability Studies in India: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Nilika Mehrotra,” Disability Studies Quarterly 41:1 (2021) LINK
• “Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability by Elizabeth Bearden,” College Literature 47:2 (2020), pp. 434-437 LINK
• “Hamlet [by Silicon Valley Shakespeare],” Shakespeare Bulletin 36:1 (2018), pp. 156-159 LINK

Public Humanities Work

• Shakespeare in the "Post"Colonies LINK

Digital Humanities

• Shakespeare in the "Post"Colonies LINK

• Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, 2018
• M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature, University of Cambridge, 2009
• B.A., Jadavpur University, 2004