Dr. Savitri Ashok
Associate Professor

Office: AMG 123 ; Phone/Voice Mail: 898-5164

Savitri Ashok has a Ph.D. from Middle Tennessee State University. Her dissertation area is Postcolonial theory and fiction. In addition to two Master's degrees in English from India (Madurai Kamaraj University) and the U.S. (Southern Illinois University), Dr. Ashok also has a Diploma in Women's Development Studies, from AIACHE, New Delhi, India. From August 1990 to 1996, Dr. Ashok served as professor on invitation in the SITA ( S outh I ndia T erm A broad) Program and taught a course on "Social Issues in Indian Literature" to American students from Amherst, Dickinson, Smith, Bowdoin and Whittier colleges and George Washington University (participating schools in the SITA program), spending a semester in Madurai, India. In addition to her teaching experience in India and America for a little over 25 years, Dr. Ashok also did a six-month stint as Editorial Advisor and Columnist for the newspaper Morning News , Manipal, India. Publications in the newspaper include original articles on Women's issues, Book-reviews, and a weekly column titled Tales from Mahabharatha. She joined MTSU English Department as full-time faculty in Fall 2005.

Academic/ Research activities as Fulltime Professor at MTSU from 2005 to date:

• November 2005: Presented a paper on "Sighs from Exile: Historical Amnesia and Anamnesis in The Moor's Last Sigh" at the M/MLA Convention in Milwaukee called "The Indian Subcontinent in Memory and Metaphor."
• 23 July 2006: Wrote a review for Postcolonial Text, a peer-reviewed journal, on PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP IN DIASPORIC LIFE AS DEPICTED IN ANITA DESAI'S FICTION
• Feb 17, 2007: Chaired a session on Rushdie at the International conference on British Commonwealth Literature at Savannah, Georgia and presented a paper on "Palimpsests, perversity, and Plurality in The Moor's Last Sigh."
• Feb 23, 2007: Presented a paper on the topic, "Who Imagined? Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Imagined Community of Nation" at the Women's Studies Conference on gender held at MTSU.
• November 2007: reviewed manuscript on "Authority and Misquotation in V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River submitted to Postcolonial Text.
• December 2007: Submitted manuscript, "Writing Woman, Nation, and Postcoloniality: An analysis of Dogeaters," to Postcolonial Text.
• January 2008: Paper on "Battering Ram, Bruised Nation: Postcolonial Nationalism and the Forsaken Promise of Secularism," accepted for the upcoming special issue of South Asian Review, the refereed journal of the South Asian Literary Association (SALA). SALA is an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association and holds its annual meetings at the Annual MLA Convention.