Ashwini Tambe, Editorial Director

Dr. Ashwini Tambe is Professor, Department of Women’s Studies at University of Maryland-College Park. She has previously taught at the University of Toronto, Georgetown University and Temple University.

Dr. Tambe’s research interests include transnational feminist theory, modern South Asia, sexuality studies and global political economy. The bulk of her work focuses on how South Asian societies regulate sexual practices. Her latest book, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws (2019, University of Illinois Press), supported by SSHRC and NEH grants, examines the legal paradoxes in age standards for girls’ sexual consent in India. Her book Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) reflects on the moral panics and racialized logics surrounding campaigns to curb sexually-transmitted disease and trafficking. Dr. Tambe has also co-edited The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia (Routledge, 2008), which foregrounds social disorder in port cities in the Indian Ocean.

Dr. Tambe also writes about topics such as age as a category of analysis (The American Historical Review), nationalism and reproduction (South Asia, Dec 2019), Indian American political activism (Feminist and Queer Theory: A Transnational Reader, Jan 2020), taking stock of #MeToo (Feminist Studies, 2018), and street harassment and class politics (Interventions, 2013). She has supervised doctoral dissertations on critical university studies, sports and gender, religion and sexuality, and transnational feminist theory. In 2018, she received a Graduate Mentor of the Year award from the University of Maryland.