Raina is an Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College at the City University of New York (CUNY). She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University in 2025. Her scholarly research has been published in Comparative Literature and is forthcoming in The Global South, as well as an edited collection published by MIT Press. While at Northwestern, she founded and served as President for The Subcontinent Project, a graduate student organization which works in and around South Asian culture, politics, and activism. She also worked as a Graduate Assistant for the Race, Caste, and Colorism Project at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute, where she worked with group leaders to ideate and organize both academic and community-based programming in the Chicagoland area.
From 2022-2025, she also worked as a Senior Research Associate for South Asian American Coalition to Renew Democracy (SACRED). In 2025, she successfully completed a Fellowship for Chicago United for Equity, where she developed a racial equity project designed to increase Chicagoans’ access to power.
She speaks English, Hindi, French, and Russian.
rainabhagat.com 