MS. KAVITA HATWALKAR

Instructor,
M.A., University of Toledo

Kavita S. Hatwalkar was born in Ambejogai, India and immigrated with her parents and older brother to the United States at the tender and adorable age of 2. She was raised mainly in Cambridge, Ohio, a small Appalachian town in southeastern Ohio where Interstates 70 and 77 intersect famous for its glass and being the home of Hop-along Cassidy.  She attended John Glenn High School in Glenn’s hometown of New Concord, Ohio. She played cello for seven years and was in a strolling strings group called String Sounds.

Hatwalkar attended Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio where she received her Bachelor’s Degree in English with an emphasis on Creative Writing, with Honors, and a minor in Health Sciences. Hatwalkar was pre-med in college and also worked diligently as a reporter and editor on the university’s award-winning newspaper, The Guardian. After a brief but horrifying stint in a Master’s program in Biology, Hatwalkar found her way back to English and worked at The Daily and Sunday Jeffersonian, a newspaper in her hometown, before enrolling in a Master’s program in English at the University of Toledo. While at Toledo, Hatwalkar co-founded a weekly poetry reading with a few classmates where she presented her poems. Interestingly, Hatwalkar’s first name, Kavita, means poem in Sanskrit.

After her Master’s graduation, Hatwalkar headed east to Long Island, NY to pursue her PhD in English at Stony Brook University, part of the SUNY system. At Stony Brook, Hatwalkar was President of the Graduate English Society, won the Meyer Award for Graduate Student of Promise and was chosen to represent Stony Brook University at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Hatwalkar has presented her work at several national and graduate conferences.

Next Spring Hatwalkar will defend her dissertation tentatively called “The American Postcolonial Empire: Nineteenth-Century American Writers and Their Relationship to Nation.”  Her academic interests include: the proverbial “man in her life,” of whom she has several pictures adorning her office--Walt Whitman, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, cultural studies, feminism, poetry, and issues of race, gender and citizenship.

Hatwalkar has two random scholarly publications with one concerning feminist Marxist issues in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, while the other discusses regionalism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Basil stories. She also has two poems published online.

Hatwalkar is a quizzical and strange creature often prone to flights of fancy and overall weirdness. With regard to music, she hates songs which ask questions that the listener cannot obviously answer. No, Michael Bolton, Hatwalkar does not know how you can be lovers if you can’t be friends. She was never given the context of the relationship in order to make sense of the situation at hand. Frankly, she does not know. Hatwalkar esteems herself to be quite the popular culture junkie as she immensely enjoys television, movies, music, etc.  She can also be found perusing Facebook and/or MySpace.

Phone Number:
(504) 280-5424

Email Ms. Hatwalkar@
khatwalk@uno.edu

Address: Liberal Arts
Building 359

Office Hours:

M 10:00-11:00am;
3:00-4:00pm
T 9:00-11:00am
W 10:00-11:00am

Courses for Fall 2009:

Engl 1157-020:
Freshman Composition I
MW 1:30-2:45pm

Engl 1157-036:
Freshman Composition I
TTH 11:00am-12:15pm

Engl 1157-221:
Freshman Composition I
MWF 9:00-9:50