Anupama Rao

Biography

Anupama Rao, Professor, History and MESAAS (Columbia) has research and teaching interests in gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology; social theory; comparative urbanism; and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.

She is Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the convenor of the Ambedkar Initiative, which is supported by the Provost’s Office (Barnard), the Deans of Humanities and Social Sciences (Columbia), the Office of the EVP (Columbia), Columbia University Press, and the Columbia Libraries. She served as Senior Editor, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East from 2012-2021 and was involved in bringing the journal to be housed at Barnard and Columbia and in developing its distinctive vision and focus together with Professor Timothy Mitchell.

Rao is Principal Investigator for the Global Humanities Institute-CHCI (Mellon) grant, “Global Racisms, Cold War Humanism, and Just Futures,” (2022-2024); co-directs the project, “Geographies of Injustice,” hosted by Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. (An earlier iteration of this project, “Subaltern Urbanism,” ran with the support of the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Center for the Study of Social Difference.) She has served as co-convenor of the project on Asian Spatialities supported by the Mellon Foundation and the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden) from 2014-2015; as president of the Society for the Advancement of the History of South Asia (SAHSA) of the American Historical Association (2010); and as a member of the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, 2010-12.