HSS Humanities Center Book Institute
The Book Institute's forerunner, the Second Book Institute, convened in June 2023
and 2024. Fellows developed concrete plans for completing their second books and networked
with publishers from scholarly presses.
Photo Credit: Benjamin Kahan
Feel free to reach out to the Institute's co-directors, Benjamin Kahan (bkahan@lsu.edu) and Pallavi Rastogi (prastogi@lsu.edu) if you are interested in becoming a Fellow or have any questions.
HSS Humanities Center Book Institute Directors

Benjamin Kahan (Co-Director)
Benjamin Kahan is the Herbert Huey McElveen Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and a number of other institutions. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019). His new monograph Sexual Aim and Its Misses is under contract with Chicago. He is also the editor of The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature (2024).
Pallavi Rastogi (Co-Director)
Dr. Pallavi Rastogi is the J.F. Taylor Endowed Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her first book, Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa, was published by Ohio State University in 2008. Dr. Rastogi’s second book, Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. Her co-edited collection of essays, entitled Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature, published by the Modern Languages Association (MLA) appeared in print in March 2024. She has also written widely on South African, South Asian, and South Asian diasporic literature as well as multiethnic British and American literature in various journals and anthologies. She serves as Associate Editor for The South Asian Review and is currently working on a book on minority non-South Asian representations of the Indian subcontinent and an edited collection on Asians in Louisiana under advance contract with LSU Press.