Shwetha Chandrashekhar is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before her doctoral studies, she received her B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. in English from the University of Delhi in India. Her current research looks at the emotional and political lives of debilitated postcolonial subjects and the affective dynamics of power, labor, and violence in the late-twentieth- and twenty-first- century literary, cinematic, and cultural representations of South Asia and its diasporas.

Her work has appeared in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature (2025), Critical Inquiry (2024), South Asian Review (2023, 2024), and South Asian History and Culture (2023).