Ishita Lahiri is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English.

Lahiri is a recipient of the 2026 Society of Scholars Summer Fellowship for her project, "Reimagining Bad Work: Speculative Narratives and Labor in South Asia." This project uses South Asian speculative fiction as a unique lens to examine society's "bad work"-- the degrading, meaningless, or morally fraught labor we collectively devalue. She argues that this genre's imaginative power uniquely reveals how colonial histories and postcolonial realities shape which work gets deemed undesirable and who must perform it. The project's central question: when societies imagine eliminating certain forms of labor, whose bodies and lives continue to bear these burdens?