Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is an Associate Professor of Journalism and English at Rutgers–Newark. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize and Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in nonfiction. She’s an essayist, critic and reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among other publications. Her work has been selected as notable by the editors of Best American Essays 2024, and she has won literary residencies at MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. Born in Guyana and raised in New Jersey, she writes about empire, its afterlives and its informal incarnations, a focus that connects two subjects of her current book project: migrants and rising seas, border-crossers both. A former daily newspaper staff writer, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard for her work covering immigration, Texas politics, and the Iraq War. She has held research fellowships at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. She’s a visiting fellow at Queen Mary University of London and served as the inaugural Ramesh and Leela Narain Fellow at the University of Cambridge.