Debarati Biswas
Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Education
Ph.D., English, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Africana Studies (advanced certificate)
MPhil., English, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
M.A., English, Calcutta University, India
B.A., English (Honours), Calcutta University, India
Debarati Biswas is a Visiting Assistant Professor and a Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) Postdoctoral Fellow at New College of Florida. Her teaching and research interests include 20th and 21st century African American and U.S. Ethnic Literatures, queer theory, radical Black feminism, and poverty studies. Her first book manuscript, Brother Outsider: Be/longing and the Aesthetics of Elsewheres in African American Men’s Literature, analyzes the affective structure of poverty or the embodiment of blackness and queerness in spaces marked by confinement, regulation, and surveillance such as prisons, inner cities, and single room occupancy hotels, in understudied novels authored by Cold War era African American male writers. Using a cultural studies approach her manuscript explores the possibilities of aberrant intimacies, radical care, solidarities, and optimistic attachments in spaces framed by “premature death.” Overall, Biswas’ research explores how Black and queer literary and cultural expressions push against the “wrongness of being” and offer alternate possibilities of being human.
Biswas serves on the Board of Directors of The Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), which is the nation’s first university-based research center dedicated to the study of historical, cultural, and political issues of vital concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals and communities. She has held fellowships at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and IRADAC, CUNY. Her writing appears in Public Books and she has co-produced an award winning docu-fictional webseries, Three Trembling Cities, on immigrants of color in NYC.
Recent Courses
Race, Writing, and Worldmaking: An Introduction to African American
Literature
Exile, Belonging, and Identity in Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature
Labor and Precarity in U.S. Literature and Culture
Selected Publications
“How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.” Public Books (2020) https://www.publicbooks.org/how-to-subvert-the-capitalist-white-
supremacist-university/
“Durga in The Diaspora.” The Bengal Story, 17 Oct. 2018. https://thebengalstory.com/english/durga-in-the-diaspora-october-is-the-
cruellest-month-for-a-bengali-in-new-york-city-mixing-memory-and-desire
Film and Media
Producer and Script Consultant: Three Trembling Cities (a docu-fictional web-series on immigrants in New York City), 2016. http://threetremblingcities.com/