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Biography
Anupama Rao, associate professor, has research
and teaching interests in the history of anticolonialism; gender and sexuality
studies; caste and race; comparative urbanism; historical anthropology, social
theory, and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.
Her recent book, The Caste Question
(University of California Press, 2009) theorizes caste subalternity with
specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in
producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation. She has also
written on the themes of colonialism and humanitarianism, and on non-Western
histories of gender and sexuality. Recent publications include: Discipline
and the Other Body (Duke University Press, 2006); “Death of a Kotwal:
Injury and the Politics of Recognition,” Subaltern Studies XII; Violence,
Vulnerability and Embodiment (co-editor, special issues of Gender and
History, 2004), and Gender and Caste: Issues in Indian Feminism
(Kali for Women, 2003). She is currently working on a project tentatively
entitled Dalit Bombay that explores debates about caste, class, and the
social experience of outcaste labor in the context of the spatial politics of colonial
and postcolonial Bombay.
Rao received her B. A. (Honors) from the University
of Chicago, and her Ph.D. from the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology
and History at the University of Michigan. She served as the President of the
Society for the Advancement of the History of South Asia (SAHSA) of the
American Historical Association in 2010; Director, project on "Liberalism
and its Others," Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference
(2009-2010), and is a member of the South Asia Council of the Association for
Asian Studies (2010-2012).
Her work has been supported by grants from: the
ACLS; the American Institute for Indian Studies; the Mellon Foundation; the
National Endowment for the Humanities, and the SSRC.
Rao was a Fellow-in-Residence at the National
Humanities Center, 2008-2009, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, 2010-2011.
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