Priya Menon

Priya is a professor in the Department of English at Troy University where she teaches Literary Theory, World Literature, Global Anglophone Literature, and Gender and Literature. Both her teachings and research work at the intersections of literature and critical theory, that shape a significant area of study—Emigrant Literature to the Arabian Gulf. Currently, she is working on a monograph that engages with the emigration history of migrants in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries, its basis, and resultant literary representations along with its consequences.  

Her Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship was to India in 2018. During her Fulbright, she was able to examine, document, gauge, and analyze the “Gulf boom” in the Southernmost state of Kerala, India in the late twentieth century. Her host institution was the Centre for Development Studies in Kerala (affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), renowned in the broad area of development economics.  As a scholar of literary studies, Fulbright offered her a point of intersection to investigate how literature brings into economic arguments of migration in the Gulf, a more generous reading of extenuating circumstances, social conditions, psychological states, and human frailties. Her publications to date, since 2018, on various issues on the Gulf, include immigration and citizen politics, gender normativity, and literary studies, and document her successful Fulbright tenure in India.  

Ask Me About:

• Constructing a “winning” proposal
• Research programs that “outlive” the Fulbright
• Reaching out beyond your host institution
• Being on Fulbright as an “Overseas Citizen of India”
• Living in India