Dr. Rebecca Whittington is a scholar, literary translator, and instructor of Bangla, Tamil, and Hindi-Urdu. Her research and translation interests center on the intersections of linguistic diversity, social justice, and the environment in modern and contemporary South Asian literatures. She holds a PhD in South and Southeast Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2019), and an MA in TESOL from San Francisco State University (2025). Her translations include the memoir Daughter of the Agunmukha by Noorjahan Bose (Hurst, 2023), the novel Malloban by Bangla modernist writer Jibanananda Das (Penguin India, 2022), and the poetry and prose anthology Time Will Write a Song for You: Contemporary Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka (Penguin India, 2014). She is currently working on a monograph and on several translation projects from Hindi, Bangla, and Tamil.
Dr. Whittington’s Fulbright-Nehru project is producing a critical anthology of translations of Adivasi writing from eastern India, in collaboration with writer/scholar Vandana Tete. For this, she is researching Adivasi writings from Jharkhand and West Bengal, translated into Hindi and Bangla from Adivasi languages. She is also translating texts in Hindi as well as working with the authors or bilingual co-translators on works written in Adivasi languages.