Lopamudra (Lopa) Basu is Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stout. She earned her BA (Honors English) and MA degrees from the University of Delhi in India and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her doctoral work was on Postcolonial Literatures, particularly the novel in South Asia. Since then, her research interests have focussed on transnational women’s literature, trauma studies, post 9/11 literature, and Postcolonial poetry.
She is the author of Ayad Akhtar, the American Nation and its Others After 9/11: Homeland Insecurity (Lexington Books, December, 2018) and the co-editor of Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2009. Her articles have been published in journals like Humanities, Women’s Studies, Studies in the Novel, South Asian Review, Nebula, Social Text, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and in various scholarly anthologies.
She teaches courses in Composition, Honors Composition, and Multicultural American Literature. She created the course “After 9/11: American Literature of Public Crisis and Trauma” and has offered it almost every year since 2014. Other courses she has created and offered include “Multicultural Shakespeare” and “Graphic Narratives.”
Lopa served as Director of UW-Stout’s Honors College from 2011-2016 before returning to full time teaching. She was elected to the Board of the National Collegiate Honors Council and served from 2013-2016. Lopa was honored with the UW-Stout Dahlgren Professorship in 2016-2017. She was awarded the Senior Outstanding Research award in 2019 and the Outstanding Teacher Award in 2020 from the CAHS College.
Since 2016, she has been writing and publishing creative work, particularly poetry in journals like in Postcolonial Text, Barstow and Grand, the Poetry Calendars of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and in anthologies like Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi) and Best Asian Poetry 2021-2022 (Kitaab). She reviews literary works for World Literature Today, India Currents, Wasafari and Volume One. As chair of the Literature Committee, at UW-Stout and the Humanities representative in the Stout Core Committee, she is an ardent advocate for literature in Wisconsin’s Polytechnic University.
Lopa’s life outside of the university is spent with her family in Eau Claire, and family in India. She enjoys cooking and volunteers to cook meals at the Community Table. She plays the New York Times Spelling Bee and Connections every day. The newest member of her family is her Shihtzu Bichon dog Mochi.