Dr. Bhalla’s book Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community is in production with the University of Illinois Press as part of the Asian American Experience series and will be out November 2016. Reading Together, Reading Apart is an interdisciplinary investigation of the practice of reading within a South Asian American book club. The manuscript explores how reading among South Asian Americans in this extensive, national book club is a practice of ethnic identity formation mediated by questions of what constitutes taste and cultural capital among South Asian subjects in the 21st century United States. Dr. Bhalla’s article “‘Being and Feeling’ Gogol: Gender, Authenticity, and the Possibilities of Literary Interpretation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake” was published in the spring 2012 issue of MELUS. The article analyzes the academic and nonacademic literary reception of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake. She is currently completing an article on the patriarchal gender politics that inform the canonization of W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel Dark Princess (1928) as key text, not only in African American literary studies but also in South Asian diasporic literary studies. Dr. Bhalla teaches both introductory and upper-level core courses in the American Studies department on the topics of American identity formation, cultural controversy in contemporary ethnic American literature, Asian American literary and cultural studies, and post-1965 narratives of immigration to the United States. She received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan.