Dr. Amrita Dhar is the newest addition to the wonderful English faculty at OSU Newark, and she will begin teaching classes this fall. Welcome, Dr. Dhar!!

Below is a short hello and introduction from the professor herself:

A very warm hello! My name is Amrita Dhar, and I am delighted to call OSU Newark my new intellectual home. I grew up in Kolkata, India, and was educated at Jadavpur and Cambridge Universities before traveling to the American Midwest for my doctoral studies. Now, I am coming to the Ohio State University from the University of Michigan, where I completed my PhD in 2018.

My research focuses on early modern English literature, Shakespeare, Milton, disability studies, and world mountaineering literatures. As a scholar of literature and a climber and 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.

In the autumn, I am teaching the first half of the British Literature survey. I always deeply enjoy this course for the way in which the central texts of the expanding canon allow us to see an entire history and culture in movement and formation! I am also teaching a course on The Disability Experience in the Contemporary World (think of the many ways in which bodily and cognitive difference surround us and, indeed, enrich the world we live in), and a course on college-level writing (for the future really does belong to those who can think clearly and communicate persuasively).

Future courses I plan to offer will be on topics such as Shakespeare and Film, Literature of the Outdoors, Lyric Poetry, and Early Women Writers.

Finally: I am always, always interested in talking about poetry and about photography. If you have a poem you’d like to talk about, or a frame you’d like to discuss, do please come by.

I can’t wait to meet all of you in person before long.