Rohini Singh

Rohini Singh joined the College of Wooster in 2016 after receiving her PhD in Communication from the University of Illinois. Her research examines how ideologies and structures of power manifest in rhetorical texts such as speeches, news texts, and visual images. She is particularly interested in the politics and images of South and Southeast Asia, and the role of corporations and economic logic in public life. She has published in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Western Journal of Communication, and Voices of Democracy.

As part of her work on images of South Asia, Singh has studied how Time magazine’s cover portraits and articles about India’s first Prime Minister constructed a relationship of superiority for the U.S. vis a vis India during the Cold War. The article, which argued that Time‘s expression of neocolonial anxieties about the “untrustworthy Orient” persist in contemporary news coverage of India, was awarded the National Communication Association’s Stephen Lucas Debut Publication Award.

Singh’s interests in Asian political rhetoric and the role of corporations in the public sphere led to an article on the neoliberal rhetoric of Singapore’s incumbent party. Her analysis of the Prime Minister of Singapore’s annual National Day Rally speeches from 1960 to 2018 found that the government constructs the nation as a product to be branded, packaged, and sold to its consumer-citizens. The article, which argued that neoliberalism is not necessarily an exclusive intellectual product of Western liberal democracies, was published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and earned the 2019 Outstanding Article Award from the Asian/Asian American and Pacific Islander Division of the National Communication Association.

Singh is currently working on three projects:

(ii) an analysis of an Indian social activist who draws on Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy to protest governmental corruption. This project involves several acts of translation, including the conversion of speeches from Hindi to English and a study of how the speaker interprets Gandhi’s memory.

(iii) an examination of the speech by which the Prime Minister of Malaysia laid out the case for removing Singapore from the Malaysian Federation in 1965.