What is Public Writing? The Humanities in Translation
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Rice University
Feb 12 | HG1010 | 1:30-2:30 PM
“Public writing” has long been an aspiration in the academic humanities. But to what public does the phrase refer, and what transformations must our writing undergo in order to reach it? How can practices of public writing extend and amplify the work we do in classrooms, research, and institutional life? And what role might public writing play for graduate students and early-career scholars navigating uncertain academic futures?
This presentation offers a practical framework for understanding hybrid genres that sit between academic, public, and semi-public writing. Drawing on her background in ethnic media, freelance journalism, academic and trade publishing, memoir writing, and editorial work, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan will dispel common myths about public writing and focus instead on the work of translation: translating humanistic scholarship across audiences, genres, and platforms. Participants will leave with tools to identify appropriate venues and occasions for the circulation of their own academic work.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University, where she teaches Asian American and South Asian Anglophone literature and cultural studies. A former ethnic media editor and freelance essayist, she writes widely on contemporary literature, media, and politics. She is co-editor of the award-winning Thinking with an Accent (2023), co-author of the epistolary memoir The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once (2025), and author of Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (2025) and What is We? (2025). Her editorial work spans volumes on the legacies of 1990s theory, the fate of the postcolonial, the Asian Century, and pandemic fiction.
This event is part of the Applied & Translational Humanities Initiative and is co-sponsored by the International Center for Writing and Translation and Graduate Futures.