People
Faculty
Anita Mannur
Title
- Assistant Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies
Education
- Ph.D Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2002
- B.A. (with honors) Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996
Teaching/research Interests
- Asian American literature and culture
- South Asian diasporic literature and culture
- Transnational and diaspora studies
- Food studies
- Gender studies
Selected Publications
- Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, forthcoming.
- “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora” MELUS 32.4 (2007): 11-31.
- “‘Peeking Ducks’ and ‘Food Pornographers: Commodifying Culinary Chinese Americanness” in Culture, Commodity, Identity: Chinese Diasporic Literatures in English. Eds. Kam Louie and Tseen Khoo. Queens/ McGill Press & Hong Kong University Press, 2005.
- “Model Minorities Can Cook: Fusion Cuisine in Asian America” in East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture. Eds. Shilpa Davé, Leilani Nishime and Tasha Oren. NYU Press, 2005.
- “Culinary Fictions: Race and Immigration in Asian American Literature” in After Critical Mass: New Directions in Asian American Studies. Ed. Kent A. Ono. Blackwell. 2004.
- “Feeding Desire: Challenging Domestic Heteropatriarchy in South Asian Cultural Production” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 10.1 (2005):34-51.
- Ed.“Food Matters” Special issue of Massachusetts Review. 45.3 (2004).
- Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Coedited with Jana Evans Braziel. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Grants and Awards
- Fairchild Grant for Faculty Development, Denison University, 2005-2008.
- Freeman Foundation Post Doctoral Fellowship. Asian American Studies. Wesleyan University, 2003-2005.
- Post Doctoral Fellowship. Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2003-2004 (declined).
- Post Doctoral Fellowship. Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2002-2003.
- Graduate School Fellowship. University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2001-2002.
- Graduate Student Scholar Award. Children’s Literature Association, May, 2000.
Work in Progress
Anita Mannur’s forthcoming book, Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Temple University Press) is one of the first full-length studies of food in the South Asian diasporic cultural imagination. The book provides food for thought as it considers the metaphors literature, film, and TV shows use to describe Indians abroad. The book considers food to be a central part of the cultural imagination of diasporic populations, and maps how it figures in various expressive forms. The book examines cultural production from the Anglo-American reaches of the South Asian diaspora, ranging from novels—Chitra Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night—and cookbooks such as Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation to Indian Cooking and Padma Lakshmi’s Easy Exotic, in order to illustrate how national identities are consolidated in culinary terms.
Professor Mannur is beginning a new project on the emergence and articulation of South Asian Americanness in pre-1965 exclusion-era literary culture examining works by Bharati Mukherjee, Bhira Backhaus, Ved Mehta, Parvati Athvale and Santa Rama Rau.