Sreyashi Ray
sray@fas.harvard.edu

Sreyashi Ray is a literary and cultural theorist specializing in critical theory, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, translation studies, and environmental humanities. She is a 2024-25 Postdoctoral Fellow and 2025-26 Postdoctoral Associate at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She received her PhD in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media and Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota in 2024. Her first book project focuses on the representational dynamics of human-animal relations in 20th and 21st-century vernacular and Anglophone literature, cinema, and mixed-media artwork focused on the Indian subcontinent. She studies how postcolonial Indian cultural productions reconfigure both locally situated and globally oriented interconnections of species with the discourses surrounding ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality, and hospitality.

Sreyashi's research has been published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies,  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Humanimalia, Edge Effects, and South Asian Review.

Her dissertation research has received grants from the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the University of Minnesota’s Environmental Humanities Initiative Graduate Fellowship, Rose Travel Fellowship for Creative Research in Asia, Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship, and AMES Departmental Graduate Fellowship, among others. The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) recently awarded a Best Graduate Student Essay Prize ( Honorable Mention) to her paper titled "Insurgent Plants: Reclaiming Postcolonial Indian Forests as Multispecies Commons." The University of Minnesota's Center for Educational Innovation has awarded her teaching excellence certificates for dedication to student learning.
Sreyashi is a certified multilingual translator and her work has been recognized by the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia and the Writing & Social Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. As a self-taught multimedia illustrator, she enjoys creating hand-painted artworks highlighting the diversities of animal lifeworlds for a wide range of professional and personal projects.