Faculty Profiles

Kritish Rajbhandari researches and teaches at the intersection of South Asian and African literature, Indian Ocean cultures, postcolonial theory, and critical ocean studies. He holds a BA from Reed College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University. His articles have appeared in Research in African Literatures, Comparative Literature, and South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies, as well as in edited volumes including The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature and The Other Nepal: Alterity in Nepali Literature and Culture. His first book, The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines how novels from South Asia and Eastern Africa reimagine stories of cross-cultural encounter, migration, and exchange in the Indian Ocean. Currently he is working on two new book projects: a study of monsoon representations in South Asian literature from the perspective of climate change; and a book on language politics, Buddhism, and modernism in Newar literature. He is also editing a volume on Cambridge University Press titled The Blue Humanities and Literature. Rajbhandari also translates poetry from his mother tongue, Nepalbhasa, into English. He has translated two collections: Purna Vaidya's ल: ल: ख: (Drops of Water, kuta pipāka, 2019) and Durgalal Shrestha's चिनियाम्ह किसिचा (Chiniyamha Kisicha, Safu Publication, 2023). He is a founding member of the Nepalbhasa translation collective, which produces and publishes joint translations of Nepalbhasa literature into English, and serves on an editorial team working on English translations of Newar folk stories. At Reed, he teaches in the English Department, the year-long interdisciplinary Humanities 110 course, and the Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies (CRES) program.