Bakirathi Mani is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also faculty in the Asian American Studies Program and in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. Her recent book, Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (Duke University Press, 2020), examines how empire continues to haunt contemporary photographic representations of South Asians in America, shaping both aesthetic forms of racial self-representation as well as how diasporic viewers claim and identify with these images.  Weaving ethnographic work together with her own experience as a curator, Mani examines the limits of visibility and visuality for Asian Americans.  She is also the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford University Press, 2012).  More recently, Mani has written on the circulation of photographs of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and photography's relation to imperial and settler-colonial archives in the U.S. and South Asia for Aperture, PIX, Brooklyn Rail, and other venues.