About Me

I was born in Kolkata and grew up in Mumbai and Delhi. After completing my BA in Philosophy at St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, I received a British Council Chevening Scholarship to do a combined Masters in Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Warwick. I went on to do a PHD in Sociology at Warwick, on a Warwick Postgraduate Research Fellowship and an Overseas Research Student award. 

 

My first permanent academic post was at the University of Nottingham, as a lecturer in sociology. In 2012, I moved, quite unexpectedly, to Johannesburg while on maternity leave. I took up a senior lectureship in the department of sociology at Wits University in 2014 and have been there since.

 

The move to Wits and Johannesburg proved transformative, reorienting my research and teaching in more deeply intersectional and transnational ways. It offered the opportunity to think more comparatively, across India and South Africa. From 2019-22, I led a large-scale, multi-sited research project at Wits called Governing Intimacies. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Wits University, the project sought to nourish a new generation of researchers in gender and sexuality studies, located in India and Africa. Amongst the many outputs of the project is the edited volume Intimacy and Injury, which also launched the book series I co-edit, called Governing Intimacies in the Global South. The project also provided a new intellectual direction to my own work, shifting the scale and scope of questions I had long asked, whether around gender-based violence and cultures of resistance, to feminist knowledge-production in the Global South to the limits and possibilities of transnational feminist solidarity. I am currently writing a set of essays on these themes, provisionally titled, Dissonant Intimacies: Transnational Feminism in the Global South. 

 

I engage a range of publics - through writing in mainstream and alternative media platforms - as well as being active on Academic Twitter. I am also lucky to collaborate with distinct academic communities across the world, whether through editing journals, or leading professional associations, or visiting positions. In 2022, I was a Hunt-Simes Chair in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney. As with my research, my teaching and supervision - and mentorship beyond the university - are fueled by commitments to build epistemic communities and infrastructures in and on the South. These efforts were recognized via my receipt of the inaugural Global South Feminist Scholar Award from the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section (FTGS) of the International Studies Association’s (ISA).