Sheetal Majithia

Assistant Professor of Literature; Global Network Assistant Professor of Literature Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD Cornell University

Research Areas: theories of modernity, globalization, comparative post-colonial literature, film, feminist, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, South Asian studies


Sheetal Majithia’s research and teaching focuses on theories of modernity; globalization; comparative post-colonial literature, film, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; cultural studies; and South Asian studies. She was the recipient of several fellowships and travel awards while a doctoral student at Cornell University, and won the university’s Beatrice Brown Award for work on women and gender.

She is the author of “Of Foreigners and Fetishes: A Reading of Recent South Asian American Fiction” in the South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection. Majithia has also won awards for creative writing and participated in the prestigious Breadloaf writers’ workshop at Middlebury College in Vermont. Majithia has recently taught courses such as “Imaging India,” “The Postcolonial Turn,” “Global Traffic,” and “Melodrama and Modernity,” which reflect her disciplinary range.

At NYU Abu Dhabi, she teaches a core curriculum course in world literature, as well as courses on postcolonial literature and the cultures of globalization. Previously, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting assistant professor of World Literature at the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Majithia earned her PhD in Comparative Literature, with concentrations in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and in South Asian studies from Cornell University, and her BA in English and the Middle East and Asian Languages and Civilizations from Columbia University.

Courses Taught