Kalpana Mohanty is a writer, PhD Candidate and Trudeau Scholar at Harvard University. She works on disability, colonialism and gender in South Asia.

Young Indian woman with black hair and brown skinwoman sits in front of a city street. She is wearing a plaid blazer over a white shirt and smiling at the camera

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Inspired by her own lived experience as someone with chronic illness who lives with disability, Kalpana is passionate about accessibility in all forms, whether that be making academic spaces accessible for all students or making scholarly work engaging and interesting for a non-academic audience. She is committed to using the rigorous framework and theory of academia to address wider cultural issues ranging from the serious to the trivial as a cultural commentator.

Academic

Kalpana received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College and went on to receive a full scholarship to Cambridge University with the Cambridge Trust Snowdon Scholarship. She is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard and was awarded a three year full fellowship from the Trudeau Foundation for leadership and innovation. Kalpana is working on a dissertation provisionally titled Body Politic: The Making of the Able-Bodied Indian Citizen, in which she will historicize and contextualize disability in India.

 

Teaching

2021 - Current

In 2021 Kalpana was a teaching fellow for a course entitled Medical Ethics and History at Harvard in which she taught two sections of 15 students. Her sections were structured around encouraging students to engage with the readings and lectures and learn how to evaluate ethical arguments. Her teaching was evaluated by the Harvard Bok Center and was recommended as exemplary of excellent teaching practices.

 

Writing

Cultural commentary and critique for non-academic publications is not secondary but rather an integral part of Kalpana’s commitment to broadening the scope and audience of scholarship in the humanities. She has written about her personal experience with chronic illness and the fallacy of meritocracy for TeenVogue, the decolonization of wellness culture for Azeema Magazine, and the ties between individualism and self-optimization for the New Republic. She wrote about the politics of beauty and the dangers of taking it for granted as an innate good for The Baffler. Her most recent article explored the surveillance of disability for The Globe and Mail.