About

Narin Hassan is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester. Her research and teaching interests include Victorian literature and culture, gender studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, health humanities, and critical yoga studies. Her notable work includes her book, Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and Colonial Mobility, which explores the figure of the woman doctor within the context of Victorian colonial and scientific expansion. She has published extensively in various academic journals and chapters, and is currently completing a book manuscript titled 'Vital Exchanges: Embodiment, Travel, and Gendered Cultures of Yoga,' examining the intersections of gender and colonialism that influenced yoga's global popularity and ideas about health in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hassan has also co-edited special issues on topics such as yoga in Muslim contexts and global health humanities, and has served as Vice President and President of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) organization.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Geography
• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Engineering
• Aesthetics
• Pathology
• Art
• Virology
• Gender studies
• Biology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• 2. Spiritual Energies: Gaslighting, Yoga, and Cultures of Healing in Nineteenth-Century India

  SUNY Press eBooks · 2026-02-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Spiritual Energies:

  State University of New York Press eBooks · 2026-02-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Yoga in Global Muslim Contexts: Cultural Representations and Spiritual Practices

  Race and Yoga · 2025-12-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Global Health Humanities in transition

  Medical Humanities · 2022-06-01 · 8 citations

  editorial1st author
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• Zooming in: epidemic, pandemic, endemic

  Nineteenth Century Contexts · 2021

  • Political Science
  • History
  • Geography

  Like all the essays that appear in this volume, our introduction is a story of disruption, hesitation, and innovation necessitated by the challenges of an unprecedented year. A longstanding Interdi...

  PublisherDOI

• Tending communities

  Routledge eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Geography
  • Computer Science

  This essay analyzes yoga in contemporary culture and addresses its potential for creating connection and supporting social justice within academic realms and within communities. It reflects the tensions of holding the dual role of "yoga teacher" and college professor and analyzes how questions of race, ethnicity, and social justice are critical to both the spaces of teaching yoga and the spaces of the academy. Discussions of yoga, race, and social justice in the classroom promote critical inquiry and shift the dynamics of the classroom and have the potential to impact a culture and its communities. Bringing together yoga and academic work can be a way to address inequities within our various social and cultural spaces to dismantle our assumptions about bodies and notions of the "individual" and the "collective." The essay focuses upon how creating a "yoga space," whether it is within an academic classroom or a studio setting, can shift the dynamics of a community and foster new forms of collaboration and understanding as well as produce social change. It considers issues of the body and touch—ways that yoga asks us to address touching the body; issues of space and community—how we build and support new spaces for communities; and finally, questions of identity—particularly how yoga can give us opportunities to reflect, challenge, and complicate narratives surrounding identity. It suggests that we need to reclaim and assert the presence of our bodies (and our yoga practices) within pedagogical spaces, spaces of the academy, and spaces within our communities.

  PublisherDOI

• Flexible Bodies, Astral Minds

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-05-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores how late nineteenth-century self-care guides, exercise manuals, and travel handbooks began to integrate Eastern physical and spiritual practices as health advice. It considers how European and American women became increasingly intrigued by and immersed within practices such as meditation, yoga exercises (asana), and breathing methods (pranayama). Tracing connections between gender and empire, the chapter suggests that engagement with Indian yogic philosophies and physical practices offered women alternatives to Western medicine – an increasingly institutional system from which they were often excluded. In a culture where medical and scientific practices increasingly limited women’s participation and sometimes stifled their capabilities and experiences, many women turned to foreign spaces as sites of healing and participated within alternative systems of self-care that encouraged more flexible and intuitive ways of thinking about the body and its relationship to the mind and spiritual practices.

  PublisherDOI

• Travelers, Translators, and Spiritual Mothers: Yoga, Gender, and Colonial Histories

  Race and Yoga · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  Analyzing the work of women traveling to India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this essay explores the intersections of gender, race, and colonial history and connects them to contemporary cultures of yoga. It suggests that analyzing gender in colonial contexts provides a way to understand the dynamics of yoga cultures more fully, and to place them within a historical and cultural frame. As a mind-body practice that was initially becoming consumed by Western audiences and by women in the late nineteenth century and that continues to be a potent and popular practice globally, yoga in its various forms and representations can reflect how the dynamics of colonialism endure and are culturally sustained.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “A Perfect World of Wonders”:

  University of Michigan Press eBooks · 2017-05-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Colonialism and Gender

  The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies · 2016-04-21 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The relationship of colonialism and gender is complex and mutually impactful. Colonial texts and histories show us how gender redefined the boundaries and structures of imperial rule and how in turn colonialism and globalization reshaped notions of femininity and masculinity. The structures and institutions of empire were influenced, upheld, and organized through gender relations and representations. Reading colonialism through the lens of gendered difference reveals the complexity of these terms and the highlights the boundaries and vulnerabilities of colonial order. This entry considers the textual, material, and theoretical aspects of colonialism and gender, and traces key critical texts that have helped to shape our understanding of the dynamics of this relationship.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jason G. Mezey

  Cornell University

  1 shared

• Zacharias P. Thundy

  1 shared

• Deanne Marie Williams

  1 shared

• Maya S. Dodd

  1 shared

• Jennifer Wenzel

  1 shared

• Tilusha Ghelani

  Bournville College

  1 shared

• Amit Ghosh

  1 shared

• Prathima Anandan

  1 shared