This overview summarizes my pedagogical contributions, creative and scholarly activity, and internal and external service roles as a faculty member in the Department of English, Writing, and Cultural Studies at Pace University – Pleasantville (PLV), emphasizing my tenure-track probationary period (2020-25) and referencing my non-tenure-track appointments (2018-20) as recommended. My positionality as an Eelam Tamil American chronically ill queer woman with intergenerational trauma manifests in all areas of my work through classical South Asian perspectives, embodiment, accessibility, and care. Key contributions are highlighted below. For details, please refer to my individual statements and CV.
My background in and experience with chronic pain, anomalously embodied print-based and digital composition, and academic ableism are crystallized in the courses I teach. Instead of subscribing to colonial preoccupations with content mastery, I present knowledge-building as an ongoing process that is fallible, negotiable, and revisable. By foregrounding community-first course architecture, writing-to-learn activities, and epistemic artifacts that depart from traditional academic formats, I invite students into equitable learning spaces that decenter monolithic Eurocentric knowledge paradigms and disentangle learning from linear progress, visual and oral interaction, perfect attendance, and error-free recall. At Pace, I have taught online and offline courses on rhetoric, literature, creative writing, disability studies, digital media, and cultural studies, as well as core writing courses. I created "Feminist Disability Justice" — one of four required Women's and Gender Studies major electives for combined degree candidates — and revised several department courses with attention to high-impact educational practices like anti-oppressive assessment, the creation and analysis of epistemic artifacts, student-guided gameplay, tabletop roleplaying games, and embodied writing. In my online courses, I use Discord — a free, low-bandwidth social platform with a preference for text that permits audiovisual interaction as well — to reduce access friction, facilitate impromptu multimodal engagement, and help students habituate writing as a social activity and a mode of inquiry in and of itself. Since joining Pace, my teaching has been recognized with 2 university awards, 1 regional award, and 2 nominations for university awards.
I use interdisciplinary approaches, classical South Asian aesthetics and philosophies, and Tamil cultural dispositions toward embodiment and ambiguity to unsettle Eurocentric rhetorical traditions and orientations to disability studies, academic style, and digital composition. Tamil literacies understand composition as both the finished textual product and the whole writing ecology — the composer's body, tools, environment — and values writing that is multicultural, multilinguistic, multimodal, transgenre, and intertextual. My key contributions revolve around my development of "repairing composition," my concept and method for knowledge-making that interrogates the complicity of Eurocentric traditions in perpetuating BIPOC, diasporic, and/or disabled pain. I have maintained a robust record of publication and presentation that precedes my appointment at Pace, indicating my intrinsic motivation to remain research active. Since 2018, I completed my doctorate and produced 13 publications (7 refereed and 6 non-refereed texts), delivered 23 talks (11 refereed presentations and 1 keynote at national conferences, 1 literary reading, and 4 external university talks), and received 1 internal grant and 4 awards (2 journal, 1 doctoral, and 1 disability activist collective award).
In my service roles, I marshal my diasporic-disabled, creative-critical praxis toward redressing inequities in the professional community, university, and broader public and challenging Eurocentric, ableist notions of service itself. At the university level, I direct the PLV Writing-Enhanced Course (WEC) program, training faculty across the curriculum in effective writing pedagogy and assessment, and am lead writer and editor for the program's AI-critical position and syllabus statement, featured in faculty workshops at Pace and external LibGuides on AI. At the school level, I regularly attend Dyson Curriculum Committee and serve on the First-Year Experience Subcommittee, working on a pilot program for first-year seminars. As department program assessment coordinator, I created an innovative assessment protocol that accommodates our diverse course offerings, coupling dynamic criteria mapping with my own digital composition practice. In my external service roles, I serve on conference committees and editorial boards; I also co-edited 2 award-winning special issues on "Carework and Writing During COVID," making space for work by BIPOC, women, caregivers, and disabled scholars disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Finally, I serve academia and the broader public by creating and maintaining informational resources on public health, chronic illness, and university accommodations, and I engage in advocacy around the Tamil genocide. I received 2 awards for pushing the boundaries of the field through praxis-oriented uses of technology.