Pritha Prasad


Pritha Prasad, PHD
  • Assistant Professor
she/her/hers

Contact Info

Wescoe Hall, Room 3137

Biography

Dr. Prasad’s research broadly explores how antiracist movements and rhetorics have historically shaped rhetoric, writing, and English studies. Her current book in progress, Rematerializing Race/isms: Rhetoric After Ferguson, mobilizes Black feminisms and women of color feminisms to consider how the heightened visibility of racialized violences after the Ferguson Uprising, #BlackLivesMatter, and Trump demand a critical reorientation of rhetoric, writing, and English studies’ intellectual and professional paradigms. Dr. Prasad is also currently co-authoring a second book with Dr. Louis M. Maraj (U. British Columbia) entitled The Benevolent Gaslight: A Technology of Whiteness, a study that explores how U.S. rhetorics of whiteness have systematically and historically situated racial trauma and injury as teaching/learning moments in the teleological pursuit of collective progress. This project explores this phenomenon across humanities disciplines/epistemologies, educational history, university race management, and popular culture.

Education

Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy, Ohio State University
M.A. in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy, Ohio State University
B.A. in English Literature & Creative Writing, University of Arizona

Research

Rhetoric and composition, critical race studies, feminist and queer studies (particularly Black feminisms and queer of color critique), and cultural rhetorics

Selected Publications

“Beyond Rights as Recognition: Black Twitter and Posthuman Coalitional Possibilities,” Prose Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 2016, pp 50-73.

“#BlackLivesMatter: Pasts, Presents, and Futures.” Prose Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-14. Co-authored with Louis M. Maraj and Sherita V. Roundtree.

“(Anti)Racist World-Makings in the University: Reinventing Student Work” in Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies, edited by Stacey Waite and Peter W. Moe, Parlor Press. (forthcoming)

“Backchannel Pedagogies: Unsettling Racial Teaching Moments and White Futurity” (forthcoming in Present Tense)