Dr. Richard Zumkhawala-Cook is a professor of English at Shippensburg University, PA, where he specializes in the study of British and American literature, popular culture, and postcolonial theory. His teaching and research focus on the sites where high and low culture intersect, especially in the context of modern transnational and diasporic identities. His publications include articles on American, British, and South Asian hip-hop music, British literature, the Scottish heritage movement in the United States, and composition pedagogy. He has also published a book, Scotland as We Know It: Representations of National Identity in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (McFarland Press). At Shippensburg, Dr. Zumkhawala-Cook serves as the NCAA faculty athletics representative and regularly hosts a radio show on his campus radio station.

Before his appointment at Shippensburg University, Dr. Zumkhawala-Cook taught at Kenyon College, Miami University, Phillips Andover Academy, and the Los Angeles Unified School District as a charter member of the Teach for America national teaching corps. He is a graduate of Miami University (PhD) and Colby College (BA).

Dr. Zumkhawala-Cook’s Fulbright-Nehru project engages the reading practices and understandings of contemporary readers of literature in English in India. He is investigating the new middle-class identities evident in the emergence of Indian popular fiction in English, the marketing practices of Indian publishers and booksellers, the practices and preferences of everyday Indian readers, and the content of Indian popular novels. He is also teaching courses on American literature, global culture, and textual analysis in order to enrich cultural understandings between American literary voices and Indian university students.