Bakirathi Mani is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of English and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program. Her areas of interest include Asian American, American, and South Asian Studies; visual cultural studies; museum and curatorial studies; postcolonial theory; transnational feminist and queer of color theory; and interdisciplinary methods of research in comparative race and ethnic studies. Mani’s book Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America, earned an Honorable Mention Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies in 2022. The book considers how empire continues to haunt contemporary photographic representations of South Asians in America. She is also the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America. More recently, she has written on the circulation of photographs of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and photography’s relation to imperial and settler-colonial archives in the U.S. and South Asia. She has been a visiting scholar at Brown University and Columbia University.