Gayatri Reddy, PhD
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies for Gender and Women's Studies
Anthropology, Sociocultural and Medical
Gender and Women's Studies
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Contact
Building & Room:
UH 1226
Address:
601 S Morgan St
Office Phone:
Email:
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About
Gayatri Reddy is an anthropologist, feminist, writer, and teacher. She got her B.A. from the University of Delhi, and her M.A. and Ph.D in Anthropology from Emory University. She is currently an Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Global Asian Studies, and Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research, teaching and community engaged work lie at the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and the politics of subject and community formation in India and the Indian diaspora. She is the author of With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (University of Chicago Press, 2006), an ethnography of hijras, the so-called “transgender” community in India. Like the larger corpus of her work, this book locates such figures of sexual difference, and the domain of sexuality more generally, within a broader field of social difference, exploring the intersections of gender and sexuality with religion, race, ethnicity, and class in South Asia and its diaspora. More recently, she has begun a research project exploring the contextual meanings of blackness in contemporary India through the lens of Indian Ocean world East African migrations to India in the wake of slavery’s abolition. Tracing these historical routes and geopolitical mappings through the prism of masculinity, this project historically and ethnographically explores the complex ways in which race, religion, and masculinity are constructed both through global as well as local contours of difference, to shape contemporary belonging. Along with Anna Guevarra, she has also co-founded a public history project exploring the long histories of displacement of migrant, poor, and working-class communities in the northside Chicago neighborhood of Uptown.
Education
PhD in Anthropology from Emory University, 2000
MPH from School of Public Health (Community Health) at Emory University, 2001
MA in Anthropology from Columbia University, 1992
BA in Psychology from University of Delhi, 1990