Kaneesha Parsard is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she is also affiliate faculty at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies.

Kaneesha writes about the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and broader Americas, with a particular interest in how gender and sexuality structure race, labor, and capital. These questions are central to her first book project, An Illicit Wage. It argues that, as British colonial administrators and employers sought to manage Black labor and indentured Indian labor, West Indian cultural works began to imagine informal economies and intimacies that cast doubt on the wage as the condition of freedom. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book trace histories of informal wage-earning and, alongside it, the development of a literary and visual repertoire by which West Indians and Britons took account of and thought about these relations. These include the figure of the indentured Indian wife who stores her wages in jewelry, the friending plot by which working-class women reject marriage in favor of temporary, transactional relationships, the figure of the outside child or bastard, and the space of the barrack yard or "slum" as a shelter for those cast off from the family. While these are practices, figures, and objects that have run out of steam, An Illicit Wage argues that returning to them might illuminate freedom premised on subsistence rather than surplus.

Kaneesha’s scholarship has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and can be found in the journals American Quarterly, Small Axe, and the South Atlantic Quarterly.