Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is an associate professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Department of English. She is an essayist, critic and journalist who writes about literature, history, memory, migration, and ethnicity. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review,  The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and Dissent. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Ms. Magazine, Lapham's Quarterly, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly Review and many other publications across the globe.

Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the British literary award for artful political writing, and was a nonfiction finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. It won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book about the Caribbean in any language from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2014. The Chronicle of Higher Education included the book in its round-up of the best scholarly books of the decade in 2020. Her creative nonfiction, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Rebecca Solnit's literary atlas to New York City Nonstop Metropolis and the Feminist Press collection of Asian American creative writing Go Home! Her essay "Tales of the Sea," first published in the Australian literary magazine The Griffith Review and later reprinted in the anthology We Mark Your Memory, won the 2019 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose. She also won the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose in 2012, for "Into Dark Waters," a chapter of Coolie Woman.

She is also the recipient of a national award for creative prose from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for American feminist writers and is the recipient of literary residencies at MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. Her work as a scholar in the humanities has been recognized and supported with fellowships from the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Society of Authors in London and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. Since starting at Rutgers, she has been a Bard at the Brooklyn Public Library literary fellow, an Andrew Mellon Foundation Archival Creators Fellow for the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), and an Early Career Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers.

She collaborated with poet and translator Rajiv Mohabir to recover the only known text by an indentured immigrant in the Anglophone Caribbean, a songbook by Lal Bihari Sharma first published as a pamphlet in India in 1915. Mohabir's English translation, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, was published in 2019 with an afterword by Bahadur, who first encountered the text in the British Library while doing research for Coolie Woman.

Before winning a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, the country's most prestigious mid-career fellowship for journalists, at 32, she was a newspaper staff writer. She covered immigration, courts and the war in Iraq for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Texas legislature and state government for The Austin American Statesman. She started her career as a consumer advice columnist for The Jersey Journal in Jersey City, her hometown newspaper. The Nieman Fellowship was in reward for her decade's work for those daily newspapers, before embarking on a career as an author, literary critic and essayist.

She has served as a judge and nominator for numerous literary awards, including the PEN/Jean Stein Award for Literary Oral History and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and has taught creative nonfiction at the University of Basel in Switzerland and Caribbean literature at City College of New York. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN America and the Asian American Writers Workshop.