Divya Nair is a literary scholar, artist, and community builder. She spent her childhood in India, her formative years in Canada, and most of her adulthood in the United States, where she now resides. She completed her M.A. (2011) and Ph.D. (2021) in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Benjamin Franklin Fellow. She completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Humanities Research Institute from 2023–2024. Her work has been supported by the Society for Classical Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. Her second project focuses on the climate humanities, examining the global transmission, reception, and transformation of ancient theories about the relationship between human and nonhuman manifestations of nature. Passionate about integrating artificial intelligence with humanities scholarship and pedagogy, she enjoys contributing her scholarly expertise to build discerning, creative, and capable generative and agentic AI models. She is also a visual artist with more than twelve years of practice.

A love of storytelling and poetry was instilled in her at a young age. Her maternal grandfather was a renowned poet and scholar of Sanskrit and Malayalam literature. Her paternal grandfather was also an author and translator in Malayalam. Her maternal grandmother was an artist and her paternal grandmother was a village schoolteacher.