Women's Studies Department Faculty

ANUPAMA RAO

Associate Professor of South Asian History

To view personal webpage, click here.

Research and Teaching Interests:

Histories of gender, caste, and nationalism in South Asia, historical anthropology, political theory, law, human rights, and the anthropology of violence

Selected Publications:

Books and Articles

The Caste Question: Struggles for Civil Rights and Recognition by Untouchables in India, 1927-1991 (forthcoming, University of California Press).

“The Gender of Caste and Sexual Economies of Violence,” Feminist Studies (under revision).

“Political Modernity and the Caste Question: A Review Essay,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (under revision).

“Death of a Kotwal: Injury and the Politics of Recognition,” Subaltern Studies XII, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005.

“Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India,” special issue “Discipline and the Other Body,” Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2001: 186-205.
[reprinted in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 43, October 27, 2001: 4125- 4133].
[reprinted in Postcolonial Passages. ed. Saurabh Dube. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003.

"Understanding Sirasgaon: Notes Towards Conceptualizing the Role of Law, Caste, and Gender in a Case of 'Atrocity' , " Thamyris, Amsterdam, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1997: 103-136.[guest edited by Prof. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan] reprinted in Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998.
January-March, 1995.


Edited Volumes

Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. (co-edited with Steven Pierce), Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, Spring 2006.

Gender and Caste: Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism, for a series on Indian feminism, guest editor Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003 (hardback). Paperback published Spring 2005 in India; co-published internationally by Zed Books, Summer 2005. [The reader has sold over 2500 copies, and is in its third printing].

Violence, Vulnerability, and Embodiment: A Gender and History Reader. London: Blackwells, Summer 2005.


Journal Special Issues

Co-editor with Shani D’Cruze, “Violence, Vulnerability, and Embodiment,” a special issue of Gender and History, Volume 16, Number 3, November 2004.

Co-editor with Steven Pierce, “Discipline and the Other Body,” Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2001.


Essays in Edited Volumes and Special Issues

“Who is the Dalit? The Emergence of a New Political Subject,” in Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in South Asia (afestschrift in honor of Eleanor Zelliot). eds. Manu Bhagva and Anne Feldhaus. Delhi: Oxford University Press (forthcoming winter 2006).

“Dalit Selfhood and Problem of Representation,” Seminar special issue on “Dalit Perspectives,” February 2006.

“Ambedkar and the Politics of Minority: A Reading,” in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, eds. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Mazumdar and Andrew Sartori, Oxford University Press (forthcoming winter 2006).

“Sexuality, and the Family-Form,” in a symposium on Marriage, Sexuality, and Community, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XL, No. 8, February 19, 2005: 715-718.

“Testifying to Violence: Gujarat as a State of Exception?” in Elizabeth Castelli and Janet Jakobsen eds. Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence. New York: Palgrave and MacMillan, 2004.


Journalistic Writing

“Indian Feminism and the Patriarchy of Caste,” Himal, February 2003.

Women's Studies Teaching:

Gender, Caste, and Nation

Gendered Controversies: Women's Bodies and Global Contestations

Gender and Empire

Activist Interests