Asha Varadharajan

Asha Varadharajan is an Associate Professor of English at Queen's University, specializing in postcolonial studies, forced migration, and decolonizing pedagogies. She holds a PhD from the University of Saskatchewan and has taught a diverse curriculum spanning Shakespeare to contemporary women writers. Her research interrogates necropolitics, human rights, and the intersection of literature with global crises such as the refugee crisis and Black Lives Matter.

Research Interests include Forced Migration, Necropolitics, Decolonizing Education, and Critical Theory. She has collaborated with political scientists, legal scholars, and business faculty on projects addressing neo-colonialism and corporate responsibility. Her awards include the Principal’s Promoting Student Inquiry Teaching Award (2021) and the IASH-SSPS Visiting Research Fellowship (2019).

• Teaching philosophy emphasizes contrapuntal approaches to curriculum redesign
• Supervised 16 doctoral candidates, 2 Master’s students, and 4 postdoctoral fellows
• Developed an online open-access course on Race, Migration, and Nation funded by eCampus Ontario ($90k grant)

Key publications address refugee narratives, Adorno’s critical theory, and the legacies of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Her work bridges literary analysis with urgent global debates about displacement, citizenship, and cultural identity.