Mrinalini Chakravorty received her PhD in English with a certificate in Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in postcolonial studies, history of the novel, and queer theory. She is particularly interested in coloniality and discourses of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Her first book, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary(Columbia UP, 2014) explored the importance of cultural stereotypes in shaping the ethics and reach of global literature. The book argues that stereotypes about South Asia (depicted as riven by hunger, overpopulation, filth, slum, death, migrancy, terror and outsourced labor) are crucial to how the crises of liberal development in this region are relayed through fiction and understood beyond its borders. She is now writing her second book,The World Republic of Queer Letters which details the dispersion of sexual self-fashioning in novels from the modernist period to the present to show how ‘world literature’ has overlooked sexuality as a site of a lively traffic of exchanges.