Dr. Dhanashree Thorat is an Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University. Her research is situated at the intersection of Asian American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Digital Humanities. Broadly, she examines how colonial and racial ideologies shape the technological imagination, specifically in technical infrastructures, platforms, and policies. Her current work focuses on how Muslims use hashtag activism to intervene in public conversations about their racialized bodies.
She was a postdoctoral researcher in Digital Humanities at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Kansas from 2017-2019. She completed her PhD at the University of Florida (2017) with a certificate in Digital Humanities. Her dissertation studied the psychic effects of racial violence on Muslims through post-9/11 Asian and Arab American Literature. She defined a set of practices of melancholic citizenship, a psycho-social mode of political participation by which Muslims confront their vulnerable belonging in the U.S. nation-state. While at UF, she was awarded the Grinter Fellowship (2011-2013) and the University Fellowship (2013-2017).
Dhanashree is a founding Executive Council member of the Center for Digital Humanities, Pune in India. She serves as the lead organizer for a biennial winter school on Digital Humanities, and advises the center on digital archival projects and DH curriculum development. She has also served as the co-convenor of the Digital Humanities Working Group at UF, and the Digital Project Manager for the funded project, “Holistic Supports for the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) and Digital Scholarship.”