Amrita Dhar grew up in Calcutta, and studied at the universities of Jadavpur (India), Cambridge (UK), and Michigan (USA). At The Ohio State University, she teaches courses on a range of topics: early modern literature, disability studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, migration studies, and the environmental humanities. She is also a climber and mountaineer, and works and writes on world mountaineering literatures. As a teacher, she is deeply invested in her students’ intellectual growth and well-being.

Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Milton Studies, postmedieval, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Radical Teacher, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Himalayan Journal, and various edited collections. Her work has been supported by the University of Michigan‘s Rackham Graduate School, Department of English Language and Literature, and Institute for Research on Women and Gender; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) project Early Modern Conversions; the Huntington Library; The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University; the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Her first monograph–whose manuscript is nearing completion–is entitled Milton’s Blind Language and is a study of the workings of blindness towards the making of John Milton’s poetic language in his years of partial and complete loss of sight. Two other book-length projects are in the works. The first of these, Regarding Sight and Blindness in Early Modern English Literature: Crossings of Disability, Race, and Empire, traces attitudes towards sight and blindness in early modern English literature to examine the relationship between, first, the cultural production of disability, and second, the intertwined phenomena of early modern global contact, race-making, and anxieties over identity, migrancy, and belonging. The second, A Social History of Indian Mountaineering, is an accessible account of Indian mountaineering, particularly Himalayan mountaineering, from its colonial “Golden Age” in the mid-twentieth century to the emerging models of the twenty-first.

She is the Director of the Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies Project, which is hosting a series of open-access digital interviews with leading postcolonial Shakespearean creatives from around the world. She is also co-editing a volume of essays on Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies: Legacies, Cultures and Social Justice, now under contract with Bloomsbury. Another connected project-in-progress is a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation that she is co-editing, as the first publication to focus on undivided Bengal as a locus of centuries-long and profoundly rich connections with Shakespeare.

Selected Publications

• Dhar, Amrita. “Shakespeare, Race, and Disability: Othello and the Wheeling Strangers of Here and Everywhere,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, edited by Patricia Akhimie (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 171-191.
• Dhar, Amrita. “On Shakespeare, Anticolonial Pedagogy, and Being Just,” in Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy in US Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts, edited by Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), pp. 23-43.
• Dhar, Amrita. “Madhusudan’s Miltonic Epic, The Meghnādbadh kābya” in Milton Across Borders and Media, edited by Angelica Duran and Islam Issa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 143-160.
• Dhar, Amrita. “The Invention of Race and the Postcolonial Renaissance,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 1, 2022, pp. 132-138 (open access).
• Dhar, Amrita. “On Teaching Im/Migration in an Undergraduate Classroom,” Radical Teacher, vol. 120, 2021, pp. 61-68 (open access).
• Dhar, Amrita. “Confessions of the Half-Caste, or Wheeling Strangers of Here and Everywhere,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2020, pp. 212-219.
• Dhar, Amrita. “Travel and Mountains.” The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, edited by Nandini Das and Tim Youngs. Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 345-60.
• Dhar, Amrita. “Toward Blind Language: John Milton Writing, 1648-1656.” Milton Studies, vol. 60, no. 1-2, 2018, pp. 75-107.
• Dhar, Amrita. “Seeing Feelingly: Sight and Service in King Lear.” Disability, Health and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, edited by Sujata Iyengar. Routledge, 2015, pp. 76-92.
• Dhar, Amrita. “Food and Literature of the Himalayan Heights.” The Writer’s Feast: Food and the Cultures of Representation, edited by Supriya Chaudhuri and Rimi B. Chatterjee. Orient BlackSwan, 2011, pp. 206-22.

Curriculum Vitae