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. As director of the Asian American Studies (AAS) at Ohio State, part of the Center for Ethnic Studies (CES), Dr. Jani runs the minor in AAS and other programming. A longtime social justice activist and organizer in Central Ohio, Dr. Jani currently serves as the president of the Ohio State chapter of AAUP (AAUP-OSU) and faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). You can follow @redguju on Twitter and Instagram, or check out his Medium page.

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 South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Marxist theories of nationalism and colonialism, and the intertwined legacies of colonialism, settler colonialism and slavery. He is proud to have served as PhD and MA advisor and/or committee member for dozens of graduate students over the years.

In his book Decentering Rushdie (The Ohio State University Press, 2010)—available as a free PDF—Dr. Jani analyzes the emergence of Salman Rushdie and other postmodern writers in light of the failings of decolonization. His current book manuscript, provisionally entitled Marxism, Nationalism and the 1857 Rebellion in British India investigates the impact of the historic uprising on Indian political and cultural imagination from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Dr. Jani is also author of several scholarly articles and reviews (please refer to his CV or selected publications below).

Dr. Jani is affiliated with several units at Ohio State, including the South Asian Studies Initiative (SASI), as well as the Department of African American and African Studies, the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages & Cultures, the Department of Comparative Studies, and The Middle East Studies Center.

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American intellectual, is among Dr. Jani’s many role models for engaged scholarship. Dr. Jani has written many public-facing articles and talks on racism, history, strikes and activism, and popular culture (see Medium page). He has given talks and interviews around campus and the city, around the country, and internationally to academic, activist, and general audiences. For speaking and writing requests, including activist-oriented political education workshops or trainings, please email jani.4@osu.edu.

Dr. Jani is grateful to have been recognized for his work over time. In 2021-22, he received a Diversity Enhancement Faculty Award from the Ohio State College of Arts & Sciences, Professor of the Year from the English Graduate Organization, and a Service Award from CES. He received the Dr. Marlene B. Longenecker English Faculty Teaching and Leadership Award from the English Department in 2016. And in 2015 he was granted, in the company of legendary social justice warrior Rubén Castillo Herrera, the “Libby” Award for Lifetime Achievement in Community Activism from the Free Press in Columbus.

Last updated October 2022

Selected Publications

• Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English. Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2010.
• “Staying in our lanes: Desi childhoods, Gandhi statues, and the hard work of solidarity.” South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, 2021, pp. 73-79. doi: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1884171
• “Anglophone South Asian Women’s Fiction: A Marxist, Intersectional Approach.” Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women’s Writing, edited by Deepika Bahri and Filippo Menozzi, Modern Language Association of America, 2021, pp. 276-285.
• “Marxism, Mediation, Historiography: Writing About 1857.” Critical Sociology, vol. 43, no. 7-8, 2017, pp. 1093–1107. doi: 10.1177/0896920516644033
• “Marxism and the Future of Postcolonial Theory.” Rev. of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, by Vivek Chibber, International Socialist Review, vol. 92, 2014, pp. 105-21.  
• “Bihar, California, and the US Midwest: The Early Radicalization of Jayaprakash Narayan.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2013, pp. 155-68.
• “Karl Marx, Eurocentrism, and the 1857 Revolt in British India.” Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, edited by Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 81-97.

Curriculum Vitae