Shilpa Parnami

Fall 2024 Office Hours: Wednesday 11am-1pm and Thursday 2-3pm in STH 641.

Students are welcome to connect with Dr. Parnami during office hours and via email.

Shilpa Parnami coordinates the Hindi-Urdu program and teaches Hindi across all proficiency levels. She also teaches India-focused humanities courses in English (Modern India Through Bollywood, Hinglish in India) and is currently developing two new courses: Modern South Asian Literature and Love Stories in Hindi and Urdu. She adopts an integrated approach to teaching language and culture and strives to create learning experiences that empower students to think critically and communicate effectively.

Hindi-Urdu courses typically include a diverse mix of students that have either no or varied levels of prior knowledge of Hindi and South Asian culture given their cultural heritage. Dr. Parnami adopts differentiated instructional strategies to individualize the learning experience for each student in the program and ensures that all students have the instructional support and resources that they need to succeed in their learning. As an educator, Dr. Parnami invests in building meaningful connections with her students by creating an inclusive, compassionate, and collaborative learning environment in her classroom.

At the university level, Dr. Parnami has collaborated with campus-wide faculty to co-teach courses for BU’s signature Cross-College Challenge (XCC) that offers a unique project-based learning experience in which interdisciplinary student teams from across BU’s undergraduate colleges tackle real-world problems and develop leadership, teamwork, oral communication, and research skills. She has taught three different XCC courses since the program began in 2018, including a course on Social Justice through Global Music and Film, and led sessions on interpersonal and digital communication, qualitative research methods, and critical media studies. Additionally, she has also served as a faculty consultant, a steering committee member, and the chair of the steering committee (AY 2024-25) for XCC and contributed to the growth of the program.

Dr. Parnami has also been involved in teacher training initiatives through federally funded STARTALK grants in the past and has trained Hindi and Urdu instructors at all levels across the globe. Her research and teaching interests include language pedagogy, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, intercultural communication, modern literature, and Hindi cinema and popular culture.