Rakhee Kalita Moral has taught literature and culture at Cotton University ( erstwhile Cotton College), Guwahati in the northeastern Indian state of Assam for over two decades. Having begun academic research, at the time she joined Cotton College as a Lecturer, on American poetry and society which earned her a PhD on TS Eliot, Rakhee's interests soon veered towards postcolonial societies and focussed particularly on gender and conflict. Having been awarded a Nehru fellowship at New Delhi's Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, she completed a post-doctoral study on women in insurgency in Assam, with several publications on the subject in national and international journals and a monograph ( Arms and the Woman: Insurgency, Gender and the Myth of Power in Assam), which is forthcoming . Rakhee has earlier also edited two volumes of essays, Gender and Society in NE India (2010) and At the Frontier and Beyond( 2005) She has delivered lectures and spoken at several forums on gender , conflict and peace building, and was a consultant researcher with Peace Research Institute Oslo( PRIO) on its South Asia project on Making Women Count for Peace. More recently she was a Visiting faculty at JNU's Centre for the Study of Social Systems and combines research with writing while she is on a sabbatical from teaching from her parent institution as an Associate Professor of English. Coordinator for the South Asia Platform of the Humanities Across Borders IIAS- Mellon program (2016-2020 ) Rakhee is currently undertaking a project on Women's Movements and Resistance in NE India with specific field studies from Nagaland and Assam. Excited about the new pedagogical possibilities emerging from engaged curricula and cross institutional conversations and exchanges , she is working with faculty, writers from NE India and legal and civil society experts to shape a humanistic agenda of connecting diversities and acknowledging shared everyday lives while creating new knowledge across borders in Asia and Africa.
Beginning her professional life working for an English newspaper while still an undergrad, Rakhee has two adult children, loves to cook and travel and currently lives in New Delhi
(She can be contacted at rakhee.kalita@gmail.com)