Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory, Poulomi Saha works at the intersections of American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. They are interested in questions of racialization, regulation of gender and sexuality, and politics of resistance -- from the late 19th century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power in the 20th century.
Currently, they're finishing a book about our abiding and potent obsessions with cults. Fascination is a state of rapt unbelief—the gripping curiosity and fervent disavowal of what we do not ourselves inhabit or experience and yet cannot shake. We aren’t simply frightened of or repulsed by cults. There is a powerful draw to these groups, to the possibility of utter self-transformation. At its heart, the book FASCINATION is interested in how cults reveal what we truly hunger for—spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally. Not just for those who join but for all of us who believe we never would. In FASCINATION, Saha explains why we love, hate, and love to hate cults—why we can neither lean in nor look away.
They are also wrapping up two other monographs. The first, Bengal to Berkeley, looks at conspiracy as a legal, philosophical, and political concept to understand the rise of the surveillance of "bad" racial and sexual subjects in WWI America. The second is a set of theoretical and historical essays about America's long investment in and play with its own sense of "Eastern" spirituality.
An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor & The Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia University Press, 2019), Saha's first book, was awarded the Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book by the American Comparative Literature Association in 2020 and the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize (2017). A South Asia imprint by Penguin Random House (2019) is available here.
They are affiliated faculty in the Program in Gender & Women’s Studies; Center for Race & Gender; LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster; AARC; Institute for South Asia Studies; Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion; and the Program in Folklore. They serve on the editorial boards of Representations and Critical Times
Saha earned their BA in International Relations (Development Economics) and English from Mount Holyoke College and their PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania.
Part cultural history and part philosophical inquiry, with a splash of theory, FASCINATION draws on decades of academic scholarship and teaching, rare archival material, interviews with members and ex-members of these intentional communities, well-known and never-before seen photographs, film, and correspondence, to blur the line between cult believer and voyeur. The groups it examines— Hare Krishnas, People’s Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and Rajneesh Movement—have been the subject of public terror, of ridicule, of infamy. Each of these groups has an iconic place in American culture. Their very names alone stand in for a whole narrative of the dangerous excesses that result from straying from social norms. Disentangling the prevailing stories we have about these groups and generally about those which we call cults requires that we understand how they come to be. How do alluring spiritual and social possibilities mutate into the terrifying, monstrous thing we have grown to uncomfortably love?
