Institute for Citizens & Scholars Fellowship Will Support Trinity Faculty Member’s Book Project

Trinity College Assistant Professor of International Studies Natassja B. Gunasena was awarded a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars to support research that she plans to publish as a book.

“The fellowship will grant me the time to finish my monograph, currently titled Cobra Women: Black and South Asian (Feminist) Intimacies in the African Diaspora,” Gunasena said. The six-month fellowship that begins this fall also will provide mentorship opportunities during a professional development retreat.

The Career Enhancement Fellows are outstanding junior faculty whose work broadens the range of perspectives and understandings offered on college campuses and creates opportunities for new scholarly voices to be heard. The fellowship—which is funded by The Mellon Foundation—seeks to increase the presence of junior faculty committed to campus engagement and thought-provoking research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Gunasena said, “I am incredibly excited to join a group of scholars pursuing cutting-edge work in their disciplines, and to learn from alumni of the program.”

Gunasena’s research argues that “Black feminist, diasporic theory is essential to understanding South Asian women’s lives in a racialized world, and that Black and South Asian women are deeply, and sometimes painfully, connected.”

There currently is very little published scholarly work on the connections between Black and South Asian women, Gunasena said. “Mine is the first book-length study of this nature, and I hope it marks the beginning of many more,” she said. “Specifically, there is a scholarly schism in U.S. academia between what we call ‘transnational feminism’ and ‘Black feminism.’ My book intervenes in that divide by pointing out that Black feminisms are also transnational and have deeply shaped South Asian feminisms, and that there’s many rich conversations we might have about how both groups of women relate to each other across their differential experiences of race, gender, and sexuality.”

This research relates closely to topics discussed in several classes that Gunasena teaches at Trinity. “In all of my classes, but especially in ‘Global South,’ ‘Black Islam,’ and ‘Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora,’ I help students understand the connections between race and colonialism, and how ideas of race, gender, and sexuality that arose during the era of European and British colonialism in Africa and Asia still persist today and have global reach,” Gunasena said.

Gunasena holds a Ph.D. in African and African diaspora studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She is Trinity’s inaugural Eric Estes ’91 research fellow.