Graduate Student

Shivani is a graduate student in the Department of French at Rutgers University, where she holds Excellence Fellowship. She completed both their undergraduate and master’s degrees in French Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India.
Her research focuses on contemporary Francophone literature, particularly beur literatures and works by women writers who are descendants of Maghreb immigrant parents. She is especially interested in how themes of silence and violence emerge in these narratives—as both forms of oppression and modes of resistance. She has published a paper on Assommons les pauvres! by Shumona Sinha and is currently working on Alice Zeniter’s L’Art de perdre, exploring how questions of memory, identity, and displacement are negotiated across generations.
Outside of academic life, she enjoys staying active through sports like badminton and squash, and unwinding with fun outdoor activities such as boating. These moments of play and movement offer a welcome balance to the reflective work of research and writing.