Nandini Thiyagarajan is a Faculty Fellow in the Animal Studies Initiative at New York University. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “The Animals in Our Stories: Reading Human-Animal History, Kinship, and Inheritance in Asian Diasporic Literature,” focuses on the intersections and tensions between animal studies, literary animal studies, human-animal studies, postcolonial studies, and Asian diasporic studies as they manifest in stories and storytelling.

Her article, “‘Like Words Printed on Skin’: Desire, Animal Masks, and Multispecies Relationships in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt” is published in an edited collection, Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature. Her future research follows the lines of her dissertation interests and focuses specifically on the relationship between animals, grief, and storytelling.