VSU English professor wins essay prize

Published 9:41 am Wednesday, March 12, 2025

VALDOSTA — Dr. Ubaraj Katawal’s “The Price of Honor and ‘Eventual’ Truth: Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown” has earned the South Atlantic Review Essay Prize.

Published quarterly by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, SAR is a global forum for the publication of scholarly and research interests primarily focused on the study of language, literature, rhetoric, and composition. The SAR Essay Prize Committee selects one essay to recognize for exceptional scholarship each year.

Katawal’s award-winning essay is inspired by Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and addresses “the importance of place and what it takes to break established traditions.” It is published in SAR Volume 88.

“Professor Katawal manages to create an admirable synthesis of theory — mostly postcolonial — and straightforward commentary on a contemporary novel,” shares the SAR Essay Prize Committee. “The approach is astute and penetrating without being dogmatic. “Katawal’s presentation is smooth and readable as he juggles topics such as conflicts between global and local concerns in northern India. Similarly successful is the author’s foray into gender dialectics and the repression of women in a third world context. Katawal’s article maintains a freshness even as he works with concepts that, in many cases, have saturated recent studies of postcolonial literature. Any reader of this article is likely to find that Katawal has provided a valuable window on literature and culture beyond the usual Anglo-American world with which many of us are more familiar and comfortable.”

Katawal joined the Valdosta State University faculty in 2013 and currently serves as a professor in the Department of English. He says, “I enjoy seeing my students grow and succeed in the courses I teach.”

He earned VSU’s 2018 Presidential Excellence Award for Online Teaching and was selected for the Governor’s Teaching Fellows Program that same year.