Profile
Raina Bhagat is an Assistant Professor at Hunter College teaching and researching at the intersection of the energy humanities and critical race and ethnic studies. Her current book project, Nucleopoetics: Racializing Atomic Energy in Global Science Fictions, examines energy and race in contemporary dystopian science fiction from the United States, Russia and the former Soviet republics, and South Asia. In this work, she makes connections between Cold War atomic histories and modern-day dystopian imaginings of nuclear winters and climate change to argue that science fiction as a genre is a crucial representational lens for the ongoing disruption of social and racial hierarchies due to global exploitation of natural resources.
Raina received her BA in English and French from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, India, and holds an MA in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her main areas of interest are the energy and environmental humanities, critical race and ethnic studies, Asian American studies, and the Global South. She speaks English, French, Hindi and Russian. Her work has been published in Comparative Literature and is forthcoming in The Global South.
As a graduate student at Northwestern University, Raina founded and served as President for the Subcontinent Project, an active TGS-affiliated organization which works in and around South Asian culture and politics. In 2025, she also completed a fellowship with Chicago United for Equity (CUE), where she developed strategies for implementing educational policy banning caste discrimination in Illinois institutions of higher education. She currently organizes with the South Asian American community in Chicago and New York City.