Bhavya Tiwari
Associate Professor
435 Agnes Arnold Hall,
University of Houston,
Houston, TX 77204
Phone: (713)-743-1737
Email: btiwari@uh.edu
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3408-1948
Bhavya Tiwari identifies herself as a comparatist at heart. She compares literatures, cultures, texts, translations, ideas, and, as she likes to say, just about everything under the sun! For her, comparison is more than a scholarly method; it is a way of knowing the world. Trained in Comparative Literature in India and later in the United States, she works across languages, literary traditions, and intellectual histories, bringing them into conversation wherever she can. She is multilingual, with varying degrees of fluency in Urdu, Bengali, Sanskrit, Maithili, Braj, Avadhi, Punjabi, and Spanish. Hindi is her mother tongue, and English, she likes to joke, is her father tongue. Her research and teaching center on world literature, comparative literature, and translation studies, with interest in Global Anglophone literatures, South Asian bhasha literatures, and Latin American literatures.
At the center of Tiwari's work is the conviction that multilingual literary cultures have much to teach us about the world. She is the author of Beyond English: World Literature and India (Bloomsbury, 2021), a book that argues for placing multilingual literary cultures at the center of comparative world literary studies. The book received the Honorable Mention for the Harry Levin Prize, awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) for an outstanding first book in the discipline of comparative literature. She is also the co-editor of World Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Brill, 2023). Her current work explores multilingualism, translation, social media, Hindi in global circulation, and comparative literary methods emerging from the Global South.
In recent years, Tiwari has expanded her work as a translator and hopes to dedicate an increasing portion of her academic career to translating the works of women scholars and writers whose contributions have not received the global attention they deserve. She views translation as both an intellectual practice and an ethical commitment for comparatists. Whether she is writing, editing, teaching, or translating, she remains fascinated by what happens when texts travel from one language, mind, culture, or literary world to another.
An active participant in national and international scholarly communities, Tiwari has presented her work at numerous conferences organized by the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modern Language Association. She has also delivered invited lectures, workshops, and keynote addresses at institutions across the United States and abroad. Recent invitations include a keynote address, “The Task of a Comparatist,” and a workshop on Global Comparative Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis (2026), as well as an invited lecture, “Comparing Comparative Literatures and Translation,” at The University of Texas at Austin (2026). Previous talks have explored subjects such as world literature, translation, social media, comparative poetics, Hinduism, and South Asian literary cultures, reflecting the wide-ranging nature of her scholarly interests.
Tiwari remains deeply committed to the American Comparative Literature Association, an organization that has shaped her intellectual journey since graduate school. She currently serves as Chair of the Local Program Committee for ACLA's 2027 annual meeting, which will be hosted by the University of Houston as part of the association's centennial celebrations. In support of this effort, she received significant funding from the University of Houston's College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences to help bring scholars from around the world to Houston and foster new conversations about the future of comparative literary studies.
Beyond her research, Tiwari is passionate about mentoring students. She has served on dissertation and thesis committees in the United States and internationally and welcomes opportunities to work with graduate students pursuing all kinds of comparative projects. At the University of Houston, she regularly mentors undergraduate researchers and enjoys helping students discover how literary study can open new ways of thinking about the world.
Her teaching reflects the breadth of her intellectual interests. She regularly offers courses on Indian literature and culture, Bollywood and South Asian cinema, world literature, literary theory, religion, translation, and the Global South. Whether discussing Tagore and Borges, Bollywood and social media, literary theory and translation, or the many journeys that stories take across languages and borders, she encourages students to read widely, think comparatively, and remain curious about cultures beyond their own. Above all, she believes that literature remains one of the most meaningful ways to understand others and, in the process, become better human beings
When she is not comparing, she can often be found spending her weekends batch-cooking and trying, with varying degrees of success, to organize her life around two small children and a devoted husband.
Here are links to some of her published work:
- The Multilingual Anglophone: World Literature and Post-Millennial Literature in Postcolonial India. (2020)
In 2011, Dr. Tiwari’s conference paper, “Comparative World Literature in India,” was awarded the Honorable Mention for the Horst Frenz Prize, given to the best paper presented by a graduate student at the annual conference of ACLA. This is the citation:
“A fluent, lucidly written exposition of the concept of world literature in multilingual India, with special attention to a reception study of the translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali -- including his own.”
In its revised version, the essay was published in The Routledge Companion to World Literature.
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