Athia N. Choudhury (she/her) is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies housed within the Department of American Studies, STS Program, and Cogut Center for Humanities at Brown University. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California where she was a recipient of the Wallis Annenberg Endowed Fellowship and earned a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Athia specializes in Asian American/Third World Feminisms and Postcolonial Theory with emphasis on 20th century body politics and militarized food cultures. She has taught courses on race, gender, sexuality, and the body at the University of Southern California, Pomona College, and Duke University as well as facilitated public workshops on race, identity, and belonging at various institutions. Athia previously held an appointment as the Postdoctoral Associate in Asian American and Diaspora Studies at Duke University.

Her current project, Gut Cultures: Metabolic Personhood and the Promise of Wellness, engages a diverse array of literary, visual, and sonic texts to thicken the relationship between nation, desire, and the science of health from a decolonial fat studies and disability studies lens. The manuscript interrogates how wellness and diet culture become major ideological exports of U.S. empire that produce global consumers whose nutritional and medical decisions become racially coded and gendered during the American century.

Athia’s scholarship can be found in The Journal of Transnational American Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, The Routledge International Handbook on Fat Studies, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, and the German anthology Fat Studies: Doing, Becoming, and Being Fat.