Srinivas Aravamudan gained his PhD at Cornell University and has taught at the University of Utah, and at the University of Washington. He joined the Duke English Department in the Fall of 2000.

He specializes in eighteenth-century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory. He is the author of essays in Diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Anthropological Forum, South Atlantic Quarterly and other venues. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999, Duke University Press) won the outstanding first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. He has also edited Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period: Volume VI Fiction (1999, Pickering and Chatto). His book, Guru English: South Asian Religion in A Cosmopolitan Language was published by Princeton University Press in January 2006, and republished by Penguin India in 2007.

A book-length study on the eighteenth-century French and British oriental tale, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, was published by the University of Chicago Press (2012) and received the 2013 Oscar Kenshur Prize from the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University and the 2014 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. His edition of William Earle's antislavery romance, entitled Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack appeared in 2005 with Broadview Press.