Balbir K. Singh
Balbir K. Singh, Assistant Professor
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
- Ph.D., University of Washington
- M.A., University of Washington
- B.A., 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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