Department of English
Photo of Meena Venkataramanan

Meena Venkataramanan

J.D. Candidate, Yale Law School, 2025-Present , M.Phil., English, University of Cambridge, 2022, A.B., English and South Asian Studies, Harvard University, 2021
Meena Venkataramanan
Research Interests Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Afro-Asian Studies, Race and Ethnicity, American Literature and Culture, Anglophone Caribbean, 20th Century and Contemporary, Law and Literature, Shakespeare and Race

Biography

I am a concurrent English PhD student at Brown and JD candidate at Yale Law School. My research is situated at the intersection of contemporary Asian and Black diaspora literature and legal theory, particularly in the United Kingdom, Anglophone Caribbean, and United States. I co-founded an oral history project to document the stories of Indo-Caribbeans who migrated to Britain during and in the aftermath of the Windrush era, as well as their descendants.

Beyond academia, I am a freelance book critic and journalist who worked for a year at The Washington Post, covering race and identity while writing book reviews and author profiles. I have also contributed book criticism to The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and New Lines Magazine, among other outlets.

 

 

Publications

“Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood by Kimberly D. McKee” (review), Adoption & Culture, August 2025.

“‘Life Worth Living’: Afropessimism, Social Death, and Allyship in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and The Sellout,” Oxford Research in English, May 2023.