Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is an Associate Professor of Journalism and English at Rutgers-Newark. She is the author of Coolie Woman, a history of indentured women shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize and Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in nonfiction. She is an essayist, critic, and reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among other publications. Her work has been selected as notable by the editors of Best American Essays 2024, and she has won literary residencies at MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. Born in Guyana and raised there and in New Jersey, she writes about empire, its afterlives, and its new incarnations—a focus that connects the two subjects of her current book project: migrants and rising seas, border-crossers both. A former daily newspaper staff writer, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 2007-2008 for her work covering immigration in the Philadelphia region, Texas politics, and the Iraq War. She later held research fellowships at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the NY Public Library, and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. In 2024, she served as the inaugural Ramesh and Leela Narain Fellow at the University of Cambridge and in 2025, she was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London.

Publications:

• "Is Guyana’s Oil a Blessing or a Curse?" (2024, March 30). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/headway/is-guyanas-oil-a-blessing-or-a-curse.htm

• "Geopolitics, in First Person." (2024, July 22). Nieman Reports. https://niemanreports.org/geopolitics-in-first-person

• Essay: "Unmaking Asian Exceptionalism," The Boston Review 48, no. 3 (Summer 2023): 114-129

• Book Review: “Two Divergent Girlhoods in Ghana, United by the Same Debt,” The New York Times Book Review (review of Peace Adzo Medie’s novel Nightbloom), July 30, 2023.

• "Tales of the Sea," The Griffith Review 59: Commonwealth Now (2018)

• "The  Stained Veil," short fiction,  in Go Home! (Feminist Press, 2018), ed. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.

• "Of Islands and Other Mothers," creative nonfiction, in Nonstop Metropolis (University of California Press, 2016), ed. Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.

• Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• The Things We Carried, Queen Mary University of London Public Lecture, 2025

• Gender, Caste, Diaspora, Barnard Center for Research on Women, November 9, 2023

• First Saturdays Book Reading, The Brooklyn Museum, March 4, 2023

• Inaugural Ramesh and Leela Narain Lecture, The University of Cambridge, July 27, 2023

Previous Organizations: 

• The Center for Worker Education, City College of New York, CUNY

• The University of Basel, Switzerland

• The Philadelphia Inquirer

Accomplishments:

• Visiting Fellow, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, 2025

• Fellowship: Inaugural Ramesh and Leela Narain Fellow, The University of Cambridge (the first fellowship globally devoted to the study of indenture)

• Notable Essay, Best American Essays 2024

• New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose, 2019 and 2013

• Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Upcoming Projects:

• At work on a book, tentatively titled The Americans, weaving together the actions and aspirations, the values and contradictions, of several groups of Americans deeply connected with my home country of Guyana in the 20th to early 21st centuries. They include radicals, spies, exiles, immigrants, and an oil giant. The details of their distinct trajectories challenge what the United States truly represents and the nature of American exceptionalism, both at home and abroad. The book draws connections between African and Asian diasporas in the West Indies and the United States and between migrants and rising seas, border crossers both.

As a writer of creative nonfiction, a journalist, and a humanities scholar, I tell the stories of migrants. My goals are to humanize them and to place them in a global historical and political context, in the afterlives of indenture, slavery, colonialism, and the Cold War.

Rutgers University – Newark was awarded a grant by the Mellon Foundation to organize a Sawyer Seminar Series titled Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures. The Sawyer Seminar, led by ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado, co-organized by Lauren Shallish (Urban Education), and hosted at Rutgers-Newark during the 2024-2025 academic year, explored themes of social justice centering on four critical areas of inquiry: systemic racism, environmental crisis and climate change, disability, human displacement and post-conflict resolution, to illuminate common histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Each area of focus reflected not only the scholarly interests of our faculty, but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University- Newark as an anchor institution devoting its resources to serve our community.

The seminar Reparative and Restorative Paradigms for Environmental Justice, held at Rutgers University-Newark in April 2025, examined local and global perspectives on the existential challenges posed by climate change. It considered how reparative and restorative approaches to environmental justice may offer more inclusive opportunities to re-imagine the terms of citizenship and self-government; ones that embed the interconnectedness of humans and their ecology in culture, politics, and laws. Recent conversations about reparations in the United States have drawn on both history and analyses of current economic, social, and political perspectives to propose reparative practices that range from monetary compensation to targeted policies that address racial disparities in wealth, housing discrimination, and education access, among others. At a wider scale, scholars like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have offered a constructivist view of reparations that proposes a historically informed project of distributive justice that serves a larger and broader world-making process. The project of reparations, therefore, has a forward-facing orientation that by necessity is anchored in the past.

https://globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/news/sawyer-seminar-series