Sharada Balachandran Orihuela

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and affiliate faculty in the Department of American Studies, the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program, the Asian American Studies Program, and the Latin American Studies Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.

She has just completed her first book project titled, “Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in Hemispheric American Literature” (UNC Press, 2018). “Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves” examines depictions of illegal trade and making them prominent in the analysis of American literature and in the construction of minoritarian racial, national, and gendered identities in the U.S. Piracy is a response to the social, political, and economic isolation endured by subjects left out in the narrow and exclusionary logics of citizenship, and is a critical strategy that women, slaves, and colonial subjects can use as a means of self-representation and self-creation through property ownership while living under a condition of erasure and abjection. The subjects under scrutiny in this book include hemispheric pirates, enslaved Black subjects in the antebellum South, Mexicans living along the U.S.-Mexico border in the years leading up to and immediately following the Mexican American War of 1848, and Confederate blockade-runners during the Civil War.

The rich archival work necessary for this research project has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Cuban Heritage Collection, the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas, the Consortium for Women and Research, and the Chicana/Latina Research Center at UC Davis. She has received numerous awards including an NEH Summer Institute Fellowship, the UC MEXUS- CONACyT Doctoral Fellowship, the Marilyn Yarborough Dissertation and Teaching Fellowship at Kenyon College, the UC Davis Humanities Graduate Research Award, the UC Davis Department of English Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship, the Professors for the Future Fellowship, and the Chancellor’s Teaching Fellowship. As evidenced in her research interests, she is particularly invested in interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to teaching literature.

Her articles and reviews have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Comparative Literature Studies, MELUS, and e-misférica. She has also contributed entries to The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies and the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture.

She is currently at work on her next book-length monograph, which will examine narconarratives, and the international discourse on terrorism and drug prohibition in contemporary literature of the Americas.