Deep Singh

Biography

Professor Amardeep Singh received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2001, and has taught in the English department at Lehigh University since that time. The author of two scholarly books with a third on the way, he is an accomplished scholar of Postcolonial literature and film, 20th-21st century British and American literature, and the Digital Humanities. In 2011, Professor Singh received a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support his research. He has published in a variety of scholarly journals as well as public-facing venues, including the New York Times. 

Research 

The new book project, The Archive Writes Back: Minoritized Literatures and the Digital Textual Paradigm, encapsulates Prof. Singh's work in the digital humanities field over the past decade, including his many digital collections as well as more conventional article publications. It engages current computational scholarship and core questions about the implications of the turn to digital text. And it centers minoritized literatures, especially African American literature, Asian American literature, and South Asian literature. What are the implications of the digital textual paradigm for how we teach and read literature? How are access and algorithms putting pressure on the Canon? 

In 2018, Prof. Singh published Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair with the University Press of Mississippi. This book is the first, full-length scholarly study of Mira Nair's body of work. Mira Nair has broken new ground as both a feminist filmmaker and an Indian filmmaker. Several of her works, especially those related to the South Asian diaspora, have been influential around the globe. In this book, Prof. Singh delves into the complexities of Nair’s films from 1981 to 2016, offering critical commentary on all of Nair’s major works, including her early documentary projects as well as shorts. The subtitle, “diaspora vérité,” alludes to Singh’s primary theme: Nair’s filmmaking project is driven aesthetically by her background in the documentary realist tradition (cinéma vérité) and thematically by her interest in the lives of migrants and diasporic populations. Mainly, Nair’s filmmaking intends to document imaginatively the experiences of diasporic communities. Nair’s focus on the diasporic appears in the long list of her films that have explored the subject, such as Mississippi Masala, So Far from India, Monsoon Wedding, The Perez Family, My Own Country, The Namesake, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. However, a version of the diasporic sensibility also emerges even in films with an apparently different scope, such as Nair’s adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

Since fall 2025, Professor Singh is also a series editor for the University Press of Florida's Queer Feminist Modernities book series. 

Professor Singh is currently serving as the Associate Chair of the English department. He has been the English department's Director Graduate Studies and graduate placement officer. He has also served on various university committees, and is currently serving on the Modern Language Association's Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Professor Singh has been an academic blogger since 2004, and his blog, hosted here, has had hundreds of thousands of visitors over the years.