Interview with Dr. Poushali Bhadury
Say hello to Dr. Bhadury, one of our newest English faculty members! She joined the MTSU English Department in the Fall of 2017 after completing her graduate studies in India and moving to the U.S. to get her PhD at the University of Florida where she also enjoyed student teaching various literature and composition classes. Now at MTSU, she teaches courses specializing in children’s literature, which, oddly enough, she knew she’d be doing even as a child!
“I’m one of those weird people that knew she wanted to be a literature professor at like 13 years old. I recently had a high school reunion where people were shocked that I said I’m doing exactly what I said I was going to be doing. Indian parents are big into medicine and big into engineering, like you want a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer as a kid. And the fact that I did humanities, my parents weren’t very happy about it.”
Maybe everyone should have expected her to go into the field of literature though, considering her #1 childhood hobby.
“I’ve always been an avid reader. I grew up in India, so I read books in Bengali — which is my native tongue — and I read books in English. A lot of British fiction because that’s what you get in India for the most part. I would read so voraciously that my dad was tired of buying me books [laughs]. I grew up in a time before computers and phones for sure, so I pretty much spent all my time reading. And watching tv also. But mostly reading. I basically read everything growing up. And I didn’t really read with regard to reading age level, so I was reading stuff that was very much in the adult realm of things way younger. I grew up in a big family and…I was the one sitting in the corner reading, and no one paid any attention to what I was reading. So I got away with reading all sorts of stuff that would never have been allowed if people actually knew what I was getting up to. I read all sorts of stuff without discrimination, everything and anything I could get my hands on.”
Dr. Bhadury read quite a bit of the Animorphs series growing up, and Garth Nix, Sylvia Plath, and Terry Pratchett were a few other favorites. But the one writer who really stuck with her, even now, is Enid Blyton.
“I used to really love Enid Blyton. She’s a British children’s author. She’s actually very very problematic, she’s very racist and very sexist, but as a kid reading her, I didn’t know that, or I didn’t realize it. She’s very much a champion of the British empire. But as a kid, her books were amazing… because she wrote about a bunch of kids going on adventures. She also had lots of stories that just dealt with fairies and fantasy and pixies and all sorts of British woodland creatures and toys coming to life, and I think as a kid, the racist and the sexist stuff sort of passed over my head. I realized that more when I reread Blyton after I grew up. But it’s like comfort food, you still go back to it on days where you’re sick and your brain is mush and you just want something brain-dead to watch. You still go back to it, but with a side-eye. Blyton is like that, but she was one of my favorites growing up.”
Now, as a professor, she is able to help others understand children’s literature in this way — enjoying what each author has to offer, but doing so critically. And she loves the children’s lit field partly because very few are teaching how to approach literature for children.
In terms of subject matter, [children’s lit] is a huge field. In terms of the number of people who actually work in it, it’s pretty niche. When you typically get a PhD in English, people expect you to work with like Shakespeare or Milton or the canonical classics. People don’t expect you to work with Winnie the Pooh. And people who are scholars of children’s lit are kind of scattered all over the place. That’s sort of what led me to choose this.
For more about Dr. Bhadury’s work, check out her faculty profile!
