Binod Paudyal is a senior lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland. His research and teaching interests include Asian American studies, Asian American literature and film, and South Asian diaspora and postcolonial studies. He is primarily interested in examining the dynamics of identity politics, shaped by social constructions of caste, religion, sexuality, gender, class, and national status, by looking at the intersectional relationships between US race relations, an Asian American critique of American imperialism, and the diverse Asian migratory trajectories to the United States. His current research projects focus on issues of invisibility and undesirability in twenty-first-century South Asian literature and culture, influenced by the “global war on terror,” migrant and refugee crises, and complex global conditions.