Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History and Associate Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is also Senior Editor, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Her area of training and expertise is in the history and anthropology of South Asia, and she has research interests in gender and sexuality studies, in the anthropology of violence, social theory, global political thought, and comparative urbanism. Rao has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (2008-09), The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (2010-10), and at RE:WORK, Berlin (2014-2015). She is the author of The Caste Question (University of California Press, 2009), which theorizes caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation. Rao has also written extensively on the themes of colonialism and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. She is currently working on a book focused on the political thought of B. R. Ambedkar, and a project tentatively titled Dalit Bombay, which explores the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.
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