Rate My Professor Sangina Patnaik

Sangina Patnaik is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College. She holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed her dissertation titled The Wake of War: Reparation in Law and Literature in 2013-2014, leading to her placement as Assistant Professor at Swarthmore. She joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor of English Literature and was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2022.

Patnaik teaches and conducts research in Anglophone modernisms, critical legal studies, and human rights, with a focus on global modernism and the intersections of literature, law, and human rights narratives. She is currently completing a book-length project entitled What We Owe: Reparations in Literature and Law, which examines narrative forms of accounting for violence. Her prior work included the project “Telling Truths: Literature, Law, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” drawing together literary, legal, and political responses to the TRC to demonstrate how fictional narratives inform understandings of twentieth-century human rights reliant on narrative form. Key publications include the chapter “Human Rights and Transnational Justice in the Contemporary Anglophone Novel: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit” (2019) in New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, and the article “Modulating Modernist Form (On Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016)” (2019) in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Patnaik has delivered public lectures, such as “What We Owe: Reparations in Literature and Law” at the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, and participated in the Modern Studies Association virtual exhibit “Wanting Everything: Tactics, Rights, and Queer/Feminist Care” for Columbia University Press. She serves on Swarthmore’s Sanctuary Committee and is affiliated with Interpretation Theory, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.