Rate My Professor Sangina Patnaik

Patnaik teaches and conducts research in Anglophone modernisms, critical legal studies, and human rights, with a focus on global modernism and the intersections of literature, law, and human rights narratives. She is currently completing a book-length project entitled What We Owe: Reparations in Literature and Law, which examines narrative forms of accounting for violence. Her prior work included the project “Telling Truths: Literature, Law, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” drawing together literary, legal, and political responses to the TRC to demonstrate how fictional narratives inform understandings of twentieth-century human rights reliant on narrative form. Key publications include the chapter “Human Rights and Transnational Justice in the Contemporary Anglophone Novel: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit” (2019) in New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, and the article “Modulating Modernist Form (On Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016)” (2019) in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Patnaik has delivered public lectures, such as “What We Owe: Reparations in Literature and Law” at the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, and participated in the Modern Studies Association virtual exhibit “Wanting Everything: Tactics, Rights, and Queer/Feminist Care” for Columbia University Press. She serves on Swarthmore’s Sanctuary Committee and is affiliated with Interpretation Theory, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.