professor
Sayantani Dasgupta

Sayantani is an INCREDIBLE professor. She puts in a significant amount of effort to facilitate class discussion, and make it that students are teaching as much (if not more than) she is. It is a great class to formulate some of your own opinions, push yourself to participate. The topic is also really interesting, the class takes the form of a survey course, covering a different topic each week.

Sayantani is a fantastic professor, and this is a fantastic course. It focuses on the politics/ethics of representation and how narratives of all kinds impact health (not just physical but also emotional, mental, social health). The course began with some broad issues of representation and moved on to covering things like constructs of disability and masculinity, borders, organ donation, structural violence, mass incarceration, "global health," and education itself. Theoretical readings or ethnographies (never long) were usually paired with either a graphic novel, documentary, or film. Sayantani is so friendly, kind, and open to student ideas. She obviously cares about the class and the students in it, and she is brilliant. She is also great at maintaining a balance between some moments of lecturing or direction and open class discussion.Plus she is willing to provide you with advice on projects outside of class. One of the few professors who I felt genuinely cared about every student in the class. It's an interdisciplinary course (sometimes taught in CSER, sometimes in Comp Lit but also counts for human rights and the graduate narrative medicine program) which means students bring a lot of different perspectives and interests. Strongly recommend taking the course. It actually changed the way I experience and analyze narratives.