Jay Rajiva

Jay Rajiva is a Professor in the Department of English at Georgia State University's College of Arts & Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His research focuses on postcolonial and global Anglophone literature, trauma theory, and phenomenology, with particular attention to South Asian and South African literary responses to historical violence. He is currently completing Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma, exploring how postcolonial texts ethically engage collective trauma through tactile reading experiences. His next project, Hollow Phenomenology, examines how postcolonial subjects transform marginalization into ethical potential using Glissant’s philosophy.

Rajiva teaches courses on postcolonial literature, world literature, and modern British fiction, emphasizing creative engagement with literature’s representation of lived experience. His recent scholarship includes explorations of animist frameworks in trauma narratives, migrant experiences in Edwidge Danticat’s work, and intertextual dynamics in Caribbean and postcolonial contexts. His writing spans critical essays on authors like Coetzee, Rushdie, and Ishiguro, as well as theoretical engagements with trauma aesthetics and postcolonial ethics.