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.