Kamala Visweswaran

Kamala Visweswaran holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. She writes in the fields of feminist theory and ethnography, South Asian social movements, ethnic and political conflict, human rights, colonial law, postcolonial theory, South Asian literatures, transnational and diaspora studies, comparative South Asia and Middle East studies.

She has worked in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, India, and has received Fulbright and American Institute of Indian Studies research awards, as well as fellowships at the University of Chicago Humanities Institute, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies.

She serves on the advisory board of the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism and is a past editor of Cultural Dynamics (1998-2005). She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (University of Minnesota Press,1994) and Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Duke, 2010). She is also the editor of Perspectives on Modern South Asia (Wiley/Blackwell, 2011) and Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East (University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2013). She is currently working on two book manuscripts: “Histories of Rights, Histories of Law” and “A Thousand Genocides Now: Gujarat in the Modern Imaginary of Violence.”