Swati Rana
Associate Professor
Swati Rana specializes in twentieth-century American literature, comparative ethnic literature, and transnational American studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between literary and social forms, exploring how ethnic literature represents the complexities of minority identity and how ethnic writers creatively negotiate and refigure pressing social questions. She teaches undergraduate courses on the creative imagination of race, the idea of America, immigrant autobiography, model minority myths, and the craft of poetry. Her graduate courses examine new paradigms in comparative ethnic literary studies as well as articulations of race and form within postcolonial and transnational frameworks. She is the author of Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream (UNC Press, 2020). Her literary criticism has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. Her creative writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Crazyhorse, Asian American Literary Review, Wasafiri, The Dalhousie Review, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among other journals, and has been anthologized in Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Hellman Fellows Fund, UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC), and UC Berkeley’s Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Research Areas
- c. 1945-present
- American Literature
- American Race and Ethnic Studies
- Creative Writing and/or Performance