Munia Bhaumik joins the Department of Comparative Literature, where she proposes to study postcolonial fiction and theory in Spanish, Bengali, and English. She plans to investigate the relationship between high modernist aesthetics in Europe and the cultural production of colonial states, as well as the relationship between genre formation and metropolitan discourses. Her main objective, she writes, is to “research the dynamics between location, national identity, politics, and culture by drawing from print, oral, and visual culture across territorial boundaries.“ Bhaumik received her B.A. from Brown University in 1993, with majors in Modern Culture and Media (specialization in literature and society) and in Developmental Studies. Her award-winning senior honors essay addressed the debates about postcolonial fiction between Frederic Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad. She completed her M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA in 2002, where she worked on urban theory and immigration, and studied the theoretical underpinnings relevant to the culture and literatures of migration. Her mentor will be former Townsend Dissertation Fellow Misa Oyama of the Department of English.