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Balbir K. Singh

Balbir K. Singh, Assistant Professor

Balbir Singh
Balbir K. Singh, Assistant Professor
Curriculum Vitae

Department of Religion and Culture 
211 Major Williams
220 Stanger Street
Blacksburg, VA 24061
bksingh@vt.edu

Broadly, my scholarship interrogates the convergence of racial, gendered, and religious embodiment, with migration and policing under violent conditions of imperial and domestic security technologies.

I am currently at work on my first book, “Militant Bodies: Violence and Visual Culture Under Islamophobia,” which is rooted in questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslims and Sikhs, especially as they relate to bodily comportment and the donning of religious garments.

Additionally, I am beginning research on a second book project — “Whose Terror? Vexed Attachments and the Contradictions of Freedom” — theorizing contemporary terror as a vexed political and affective attachment through an intersectional feminist lens.

  • Women of Color Feminisms
  • Asian and Arab American Studies
  • Race, Religion, and Empire
  • Fashion and the Body
  • Anti-Colonial and Decolonial Thought
  • PhD, University of Washington
  • MA, University of Washington
  • BA, SUNY Buffalo
  • American Studies Association
  • National Women’s Studies Association
  • Critical Ethnic Studies Association
  • Association for Asian American Studies
  • Arab American Studies Association
  • Embrey Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2017-18
  • Gender and Sexuality Studies Seminar, Scholl Center, Newberry Library, 2017
  • Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Departments of Asian American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2016-17
  • Emerging Diversity Scholar, National Center for Institutional Diversity, 2016
  • Andrew R. Hilen Dissertation Fellowship, Department of English, University of Washington, 2015

Books

  • Militant Bodies: Violence and Visual Culture Under Islamophobia. Book manuscript in preparation.

Journal Articles

  • Singh, Balbir K. “The Commodity Fetish of Modest Fashion.” QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, vol. 4, no. 3, 2017. 
  • Singh, Balbir K. “Unjust Attachments: Mourning as Antagonism in Gauri Gill’s ‘1984.’” What Justice Wants, special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, Fall 2016.
  • Singh, Balbir K. “On the Limits of Charhdi Kala: Oak Creek and Sikh Philosophy in an Age of Terror.” Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory. Taylor & Francis, 2013. 

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