Rate My Professor Sangina Patnaik

Sangina Patnaik is Associate Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College. She earned her B.A. from the University of Iowa and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation titled “The Wake of War: Reparation in Law and Literature.” After completing her doctorate, she joined Swarthmore as Assistant Professor of English Literature and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in March 2022, as one of ten faculty across disciplines recognized for their outstanding contributions.

Patnaik teaches and researches in Anglophone modernisms, critical legal studies, and human rights. Through her scholarship, she investigates global modernism, critical legal studies, and human rights. She has worked on the project “Telling Truths: Literature, Law, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” which draws together literary, legal, and political responses to the TRC to demonstrate how studying fictional narratives is essential to understanding the narrative reliance in 20th-century human rights frameworks. She is currently completing the book project *What We Owe: Reparations, Human Rights, and Twentieth-Century Literature*, exploring narrative forms of accounting for violence; this work supported her selection as a Summer Resident Scholar at the National Humanities Center in 2022. Her key publications include the book chapter “Human Rights and Transnational Justice in the Contemporary Anglophone Novel: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit” in New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and the review essay “Modulating Modernist Form (On Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016)” in Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (2019). Patnaik recently contributed to the Modern Studies Association virtual exhibit “Wanting Everything: Tactics, Rights, and Queer/Feminist Care” for Columbia University Press. She holds affiliations with Sanctuary at Swarthmore, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Interpretation Theory, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.