Sonali Perera

Faculty Fellow

Sonali Perera is the author of No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2014). She is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. At Hunter, she also serves as the Deputy Chair of the interdisciplinary Thomas Hunter Honors Program. 

Her teaching and research areas include postcolonial studies, working-class literature, Marxist theory, feminist theory, human rights, and globalization studies. Her articles and reviews have appeared in PMLA, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society (films for the feminist classroom) and in interdisciplinary anthologies, including South Asian Feminisms and The State of Human Rights. She is a contributing editor of the journal, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. 

She is currently at work on two projects—one is a monograph, tentatively titled, Between Imperialism and Internationalism: World Literature and Human Rights, the other is her contribution, “States of Indebtedness and the Gift of Human Rights,” to a co-authored volume on the interdiscipline of literature and human rights. Her current work examines how we contextualize and reimagine the meaning of the gift, the debt, the loan of human rights—also the possibility of a radical generosity and exchanges of mutual aid—in our contemporary postcolonial age characterized by sovereign debt crises, periodized as neoliberal, but also shaped, framed, and interrupted by ongoing anticolonial class struggles.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.