Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Professor and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies
Professor of Sociology, Cultural Foundations of Education
Dean’s Professor of the Humanities
2008 Honorary Doctor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Sweden

Department of Women's & Gender Studies
208 Bowne Hall
Syracuse University,
Syracuse, NY 13244

Email: ctmohant@syr.edu
Phone: (315) 443-6541
Office: 208 Bowne Hall
Office Hours: Wednesday 1-3 & by appointment
Click Here for complete CV.

My work focuses on transnational feminist theory, studies of colonialism, imperialism and culture, and anti-racist education. Growing up as a part of the post-independence generation in India, questions of decolonization and economic and social justice have always been at the center of my research, activism and teaching. My intellectual preoccupations in the 1980s focused on the way the "West" colonizes gender, and in particular, its colored, racial and class dimensions. In 2008/9 I am centrally concerned with the way that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. My scholarship focuses on the politics of difference and solidarity, the crossing of borders, the relation of feminist knowledges and scholarship to organizing and social movements, mobilizing a transnational feminist anti-capitalist critique, decolonizing knowledge, and theorizing agency, identity and resistance in the context of feminist solidarity. My current work examines the politics of feminist anti-imperialist praxis in the academy and in social movements.

Education

Ph.D. 1987: Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
M.A.1980: in the Teaching of English, Department of English, University of Illinois
M.A. 1976: English, University of Delhi, India
B.A. 1974: Honors in English, University of Delhi

Courses Taught

WS 101: Introduction to Women's Studies
WS 400.5/600.5: Feminism and Postcolonial Studies
WS 495/695: The Practice of Transnational Feminism

Recent Interviews:

Video:

• Anticapitalist Feminist Struggle, and Transnational Solidarity, video by Jesper Nordahl, 2007

Newspaper Interviews:

• Dagens Nyheter, Sweden, Interview with Stefan Jonsson, August 2007 http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?a=683500
• Il Manifesto, Italy, Interview with Gigi Roggerro, October 2006 http://www.ilmanifesto.it

Ongoing Projects:

• Co-Editor, with Margaret Wetherell, Director, U.K. Economic and Social Research Council Programme on Identities and Social Action, Sage Handbook of Identities, (expected publication, 2008/9)
• Co-author with Minnie Bruce Pratt, At Home in the Struggle (forthcoming from Duke University Press)

Recent Talks

• Closing Plenary:
  "Breaking New Ground" National Council for Research on Women Annual Conference New York University, 7 June 2008
• Open Lecture:
  "Feminism Without Borders: On Insurgent Knowledge and Radical Politics" Lund University, Sweden, 28 May 2008
• Public Lecture:
  "Remaining Awake During a Revolution: On Insurgent Knowledge and Feminist Commitments" Bloomsburg University, PA, 4 March 2008
• Opening Keynote:
  "The Twenty-First Century Challenge: Feminism Without Borders" Intercultural Feminist Without Borders Week, University of Granada, Spain, 8 to 11 October 2007
• Scholar’s Convocation Address:
  "Practicing Wakefulness: On Imperial Projects, Insurgent Knowledges, and Feminist Commitments" Grinnell College, 27 September 2007 (part of a symposium commemorating the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1967 Address at Grinnell College, "Remaining awake During a Revolution")
• Keynote address:
  "Colonized Spaces, Insurgent Knowledges: A Feminist Journey of Dissent and Solidarity"
  Conference on Past, Present, Future: From Women’s Studies to Post-Gender Research, Umea University, Sweden, 15 June 2007
• Public Lecture/Panel Discussion on Feminism Without Borders:
  translated into Swedish and published by Tankekraft, Sodra Teatern, Stockholm, Sweden, 13 June 2007

Honors/Consultancies

• Honorary Doctorate, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Sweden, conferred May 2008 http://sunews.syr.edu/story_dtails.cfm?id=4668
• Fulbright Senior Specialist Award, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland, 2005/6
• Ford Foundation, Consultant, and Evaluator of Crossing Borders, Revitalizing Area Studies 2004/5
• AAC&U/FIPSE Advisory Board and Consultant, Global Citizenship and the Arts of Democrary 2001-2004

Editorial & Advisory Boards

• National Advisory Board, Signs, A Journal Of Women in Culture and Society
• Editorial Board, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (West Indies)
• Advisory Board, Peer Review , Association of American Colleges and Universities
• National Advisory Board, Perspectives in Education, (South Africa)
• Board Co-Chair, Grassroots Leadership of North Carolina
• Advisory Board, Center for Immigrant Families (New York City)
• Advisory Board, Solidarity Work, University of California, Riverside
• Editorial Board, Feminist Africa, (2007-)
• Editorial Board, Asian Women, Research Institute of Asian Women, Sookmyung Women’s University, Korea, 2006-
• Advisory Board, Transformations, The Journal of Inclusive Pedagogy and Scholarship, (2006-)

Selected Publications:

Books:

Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism, Co-Edited with Robin L. Riley and Minnie Bruce Pratt, London and New York: Zed Books, 2008

Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
South Asian edition published in 2004 by Zubaan Books, Kali for Women, New Delhi, India.
Translated into Korean, 2005
Translated into Swedish, 2006

Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, co-edited with M. Jacqui Alexander, New York: Routledge, 1997

Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, co-edited with Lourdes Torres and Ann Russo, Indiana University Press, 1991

Essays / Chapters:

Foreword to
Playing With Fire, Feminist Thought Wrapped in Seven Lives In India
by Richa Nagar and the Sangtin Writers Collective, University of Minnesota Press

 

"Towards an Anti-Imperialist Politics: Reflections of a Desi Feminist" in South Asian Popular Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2004

"Under Western Eyes Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anti-Capitalist Struggles" SIGNS, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28, no. 2, Winter 2003; Reprinted in Women’s Studies for the Future, Rutgers University Press, 2005

"Transnational Pedagogy: Doing Political Work in Women’s Studies" Interview in Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal, Vol. 26.2, Spring/Summer 2002

"Race-ing Class and Gender (and Nation): Reconciling the Either Or" in Race and Public Policy, edited by Makani N. Themba, Applied Reseach Center, CA, 2000

"U.S. Empire and The Project of Women’s Studies: Stories of Citizenship, Complicity, and Dissent" in Gender, Place and Culture, A Journal of Feminist Geography. Winter 2006.

Series Editor:

Comparative Feminist Studies Palgrave/Macmillan (2003---)

Books published thus far:

• Volume 1
  Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India
  by Charu Gupta, 2002
• Volume 2
  Twenty-first Century Feminist Classrooms: Pedagogies of Identity and Difference
  edited by Amie Macdonald and Susan Sanchez-Casal, 2002
• Volume 3
  Reading Across Borders, Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance
  by Shari Stone-Mediatore, 2003
• Volume 4
  Made in India: Queer Sexualities, Decolonization, and Transnational Projects
  by Suparna Bhaskaran, 2004
• Volume 5
  Difference and Dialogue: Feminisms Contest Globalization
  edited by M. Waller and S. Marcos, 2005
• Volume 6
  Engendering Human Rights, Cultural and Socio-Economic Realities in Africa
  edited by Obioma Nnaemeka and Joy Ezeilo, 2005
• Volume 7
  Women’s Same-Sex Experiences in a Globalizing Asia
  edited by Saskia Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya, 2007
• Volume 8
  Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics
  by Nikol Alexander-Floyd, 2007
• Volume 9
  Transnational Feminism in Film and Media
  edited by Katarzyna Marciniak, Aniko Imre, and Aine O’Healy, 2007
• Volume 10
  Gender, Identity, and Imperialism: Women Development Workers in Pakistan
  by Nancy Cook, 2007

SEE: http://www.palgrave-usa.com/series/serieslist.aspx?page=1&series=Comparative%20Feminist%20Studies