Kristina Rogahn
Assistant Professor, Asian Studies
Academic focus:
I study South Asian literature and religion and specialize in Tamil. Much of my research focuses on the roles of poets and poetry in South Asian society. Broadly, I am interested in South Asia's role in the humanities.
Current research project:
My current book project, “Modern Literary History and Devotion to Literature in Tamil,” investigates how literary knowledge transformed during colonial modernity in what is now South India and Sri Lanka. Specifically, it traces the emergence of "Tamil literary history" as a new set of affects, genres and concepts for making sense of Tamil's literary past. This project diversifies the current vocabulary and methods for literary studies by revealing lesser-known forms of philology and other ways of relating to literature that have existed in Tamil spaces.
Previous positions:
Lecturer, Stanford University, 2023-2025
Academic background:
Ph.D., Department for the Study of Religion and Program in Book History and Print Culture, University of Toronto, 2026
M.A., South and Southeast Asian studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2016
B.A., Comparative literature and South Asian languages and civilizations, 2012
Last book read:
Some non-academic books I'm currently reading are “Victory City” by Salman Rushdie, “In Praise of Good Bookstores” by Jeff Deutsch, and “The Lyrics” by Paul McCartney.
In your own time/when not working:
I love to garden, bake and hang out with my pets.
Courses you’re most looking forward to teaching:
I'm excited to highlight the creative components of academic work with students. I look forward to helping students develop their unique voices as writers and demystify academic writing in my First-year Writing Seminar course, Songs of Love and War: South Asian Lyrics. In spring, I look forward to teaching a course on the Arts of Hindu Devotion, in which students will have a lot of one-on-one encounters with verbal and visual arts, films and performances.
What most excites you about Cornell:
I look forward to learning a lot from new colleagues and students across disciplines and discovering more about the history of the campus and the region.
