Professor Rungoo received her BA in French Studies with a specialization in Quebecois Literature from Trent University (2008), her MA in French Studies from Queen’s University (2011) and her PhD in French Studies and African American Studies from Yale University (2018).

Her research interests include Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean Literatures; Global South Islands; Oceanic Studies; Aesthetic Experimentation, Justice and Resistance; Spatial and Embodied Histories; Transatlantic and Transnational Studies, Quebecois Literatures

At the core of Professor Rungoo’s research is the idea that Global South islands have been and continue to be used as colonial laboratories but can conversely serve as potential sites of restorative justice. Her first book project, Textual Territories, considers the literary geographies of resistance created by novelists of the Indian Ocean and Caribbean through their use of innovative poetics and aesthetics, often informed by local languages and intertexts. The project pays particular attention to historically significant sites such as the morne, the Creole city and the colonial botanical garden. It argues that these, when read together, constitute a geographical archive that rewrite dominant historical narratives. Her second book project, The Laboratory Island, follows the history of the Global South island from its use as a colonial laboratory for various labor systems (slave, indenture, blackbirding, and penal labor) to its current instrumentalization within the tourism and military industrial complexes. The project then re-centers local island literatures, to read them as both aesthetic objects and works of advocacy. It asks whether the discursive laboratory generated by these literatures can offer a different worldview to potentially rewrite the narrative of the island as laboratory.

Professor Rungoo’s overall research attempts to answer a frequently asked question in higher education: what is the use of the humanities? More specifically, her research asks: what can literature and aesthetics offer to us? Taking as case studies island writing often informed by local archives and histories, it posits aesthetic experimentation as a powerful tool in shifting our perspective, be it on islands, islanders or the broader world. A literary text is a practical intervention in the way we understand and live in the world, and therefore an inherently political act.

Professor Rungoo’s publications have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Wasafari and The Progressive among others.