Sravanthi Kollu

Dr. Sravanthi Kollu is Assistant Professor and Hanuma and Anuradha Kodavalla Endowed Chair in Telugu. She works on literary culture, poetry and public life, with a particular emphasis on philosophies of language and subaltern critiques within the literary sphere. 

Dr. Kollu’s first monograph, On Common Speech and Late Colonial Romanticisms, places Telugu Dalit romantic poetry at the center of its comparative analysis of Indian romanticisms. She tracks the development of Indian romanticisms across Telugu, Kannada and Hindi to show how poets writing within distinct linguistic-literary traditions nevertheless shared vocabularies and ideas. She reads Telugu Dalit romanticism against and within this broader literary field to demonstrate that its deviation from established romantic literary forms posed a strident literary and social critique of caste hierarchies. 

Her second book project “Lyric Autonomy and Reproductive Poetics” tracks the afterlives of romanticism in 20th century Telugu feminist poetry. It studies how this poetry used lyric address to expand left-oriented vocabularies of labor into a concern with reproductive labor. 

Dr. Kollu’s work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Maidaanam, and is forthcoming in the Journal of World Literature. She serves on Maidaanam’s editorial collective and is part of the Community Psychoanalysis Program at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. 

At the University of Washington, Dr. Kollu will teach courses on modern South Asian literature, global romanticisms, the politics of language in South Asia, and feminist and Dalit literatures, with an emphasis on Telugu and other South Indian literary traditions. 

Before joining the University of Washington, she held postdoctoral appointments at Harvard University and at Boston University’s Kilachand Honors College, where she was co-organizer of the Boston Poetics Workshop, a workshop committed to conversations among poets, scholars and translators.