Meet the Director
Dr. Harleen Singh
Photo Credit: Heratch Ekmekjian
Harleen Singh, PhD
Harleen Singh is WSRC's director and associate professor of South Asian Literature and Women's Studies. She and Sarah Lamb founded the South Asian Studies Program at Brandeis, and Singh served as its chair from 2007-16. She is the faculty representative to the Board of Trustees at Brandeis.
Her writing on novels from India and Pakistan, Indian film and book reviews on hip-hop music, sexuality and feminism have been published in various leading journals. Her chapters on women warriors and South Asian women writers are included in seminal book collections. Her monograph, "The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India" (Cambridge, 2014), interprets the conflicting, mutable images of an historical icon as they change over time in literature, film, history and popular culture. The book is in its second reprint and has been reviewed in The Telegraph, Economic and Political Weekly, The Book Review, BIBLIO, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
Professor Singh is a recipient of the ACLS Burkhardt fellowship and was a resident fellow at the National Humanities Center.
In the News
Professor of Sociology Karen V. Hansen served as director of the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis from 2017 – 2020.