Sowmya Ramanathan

Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies

Office: Washington Hall 227
Phone: (757) 221-2446
Email: [[sramanathan]]

Sowmya Ramanathan is a scholar of 20^th and 21^st-century Latin American literature and culture working at the intersections of avant-garde, gender, sexuality, and affect studies. Her current manuscript-in-progress, titled Textures of the Sensible: Reading Affect in Diamela Eltit, examines the work of Chilean writer, artist, and activist, Diamela Eltit. This book assesses Eltit’s incorporation of neobaroque, Boom, Surrealist, and other avant-garde elements into her work and foregrounds the affective and sensible concerns at the heart of Eltit’s consolidation of a literary praxis. Sowmya argues for reading affect as the ambivalent force of transformative potential that drives Eltit’s creative process, while also underscoring its centrality to the formal compositions and social dynamics within her novels.
In addition to this project, Sowmya’s interests include women writers in Latin America, transnational feminism and political resistance, and the relationship between literature, media, and contemporary technologies. Sowmya holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley in Sociology and Spanish and Portuguese. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University. Prior to joining William & Mary, she taught classes at Princeton University, Barnard College, and the Universidad Diego Portales.

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Sowmya Ramanathan

Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies