Dr. Pranav Jani is Associate Professor of English with a focus in postcolonial studies and critical ethnic studies and began teaching at Ohio State in Fall 2004. He is affiliated with several units at Ohio State, including the Center for Ethnic Studies (CES), Department of African American and African Studies, the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages & Cultures, the Department of Comparative Studies, the Middle East Studies Center, and the South Asian Studies Initiative.

Dr. Jani’s research and teaching interests focus on the literatures, cultures, and history of colonized and formerly colonized people (including Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Ireland) and people of color in the United States. In particular, Dr. Jani specializes in Anglophone literatures of South Asia and its diaspora, theories and histories of anticolonial nationalism, the study of subalternity and solidarity, and Marxist approaches to race, colonialism, and culture.

Currently, Dr. Jani is working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled The 1857 Rebellion and the Indian Political Imagination, an investigation of the changing representations and narratives of the Indian Rebellion and its impact on Indian thought before and after independence.

Dr. Jani has written many public-facing articles and delivered many talks to academic, activist, and community audiences. A longtime social justice activist and organizer, Dr. Jani currently serves on the Board of the Ohio State chapter of AAUP (AAUP-OSU) and was its past president (2021-25). He is part of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) and served as advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine from 2010-2025).

Dr. Jani was grateful to be named Professor of Year by the English Graduate Student Organization twice (2022, 2025) and received a Diversity Enhancement Faculty Award from the Ohio State College of Arts & Sciences (2022). In 2024, Dr. Jani was a Faculty Inductee in the 118th Class of the Sphinx Honorary Society at Ohio State. He was awarded the Dr. Marlene B. Longenecker English Faculty Teaching and Leadership Award from the English Department in 2016. In 2015 he was granted the Libby Award for Lifetime Achievement in Community Activism by the Columbus Free Press.

Last updated August 2025

Selected Publications

• Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English. Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2010. Republished, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2011.
• “Centering the Oppressed: Marxism and the Problematic of Race and Class.” In On Race, Class, and Educational Reform: Contested Perspectives. Eds. Antonia Darder, Cleveland Hayes, and Howard Ryan. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 69-81.
• “Realism and the South Asian Novel.” Realism and the Novel: A Global History. Ed. Paul Stasi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 372–388.
• “Elites, Subalterns, and the Postcolonial Nation: Indian English Novels of the 1980s and 1990s.” In Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures. Eds. Ulka Anjaria and Anjali Nerlekar. Oxford University Press, 2024.
• “Anglophone South Asian Women’s Fiction: A Marxist, Intersectional Approach.” In Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women’s Writing. Eds. Deepika Bahri and Filippo Menozzi. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2021. 276-285.
• “Staying in our lanes: Desi childhoods, Gandhi statues, and the hard work of solidarity”, South Asian Popular Culture, 19:1, 73-79.

Curriculum Vitae