Gurleen Grewal

Emerita

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Bio

Dr. Gurleen Grewal is interested in globality, transnational and multilingual, and the aesthetic forms and perspectives that articulate difference to affirm a unitive and liberating vision for humanity.

She has taught and written extensively about contemporary American and global postcolonial women writers who illumine the experience of peoples/cultures shaped by the historic formations of global capital. An NEH Summer Institute on Sustainability and the Humanities at Arizona State University, Flagstaff in 2011 deepened her understanding of the environmental humanities.   As founding director of the Center for India Studies (2009 to 2013) Dr. Grewal organized the USF World Conference on Eastern and Indigenous Perspective on Sustainability and Conflict Resolution (2011).  She dwells on the epistemic roots of our crisis of alienation from cosmic life. Dr. Grewal is inspired by the work of the Fetzer Institute, whose aim she shares: "to help us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, each other, and the natural world."

Her spiritual autobiography “A Thousand Words for Mother” contemplates the thematics of exile, home and belonging; ultimately questioning the template of the isolate self, it celebrates unitive consciousness and the divine feminine. 

Education

  • PhD, University of California, Davis
  • M.A. in English, Delhi University
  • B.A. in English, Indraprastha College for Women, Delhi University

Areas of Specialty

Toni Morrison/African American Literature; South Asian Literature; American Multi-Ethnic Literatures; Contemporary Women Writers; Memoir; Religious and Philosophical Themes in Literature; Environmental Literature; Contemplative Pedagogy

Awards

Dr. Grewal has received two university-wide Teaching Awards and a Toni Morrison Society book award for Circles of Sorrow/Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison (LSU Press) in 2000, and two creative writing residency awards (at Hedgebrook, Whidbey Island, WA; Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi). She received the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Contemplative Practice Fellowship, supporting teaching that ameliorated suffering and promoted peace and social justice.

Graduate mentoring

At the graduate level, Dr. Grewal has taught seminars on Toni Morrison, Postcolonial Studies, Environmental Literature, Critical Theory, and Women's Spiritual Memoirs. Since coming to the English Dept in 2009, she has directed seven doctoral  dissertations (co-directing three) and served as committee member on 17 doctoral theses. The dissertation topics include Toni Morrison, South Asian literature, Anthropocene fiction, spirituality and contemplative pedagogy.

She has served as a committee member on 10 Master’s theses in Women's Studies, where she taught for 15 years, and directed 3 MA theses in Women’s Studies and English.

recent publications

  •  The  Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison. Bloomsbury Press. Eds. Co-eds. Linda Wagner-Martin and Kelly Reames. Bloomsbury Press, 2023: 167-180.
  • “Gurus of Sound.” Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts. November 2022, Issue #5, 30-40.  
  •  MLA Approaches to Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers. Eds. Deepika Bahri and Filippo Menozzi. N.Y.: MLA. 2021. 52-60. 
  • “Joy Kogawa.” Asian American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students. Ed. Keith Lawrence. ABC-Clio/Greenwood Press, 2021. 184-188.
  • “Contemplative Poetics and Pedagogy for Sustainability." Teaching Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences. Eds. Wendy Petersen Boring and William Forbes. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013. 162-172.
  • “The Working Through of the Disconsolate: Transformative Spirituality in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” in Toni Morrison: Paradise, Love, Mercy. Ed. Lucille P. Fultz. Continuum Press, 2012. 40-54.
  • “Beholding ‘A Great Tree in Leaf’: Eros, Nature and the Visionary in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” ‘The Inside Light’: Collected Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. Ed. Deborah Plant. N.Y.: Praeger, 2010. 103-112.