Kamala Visweswaran

Kamala Visweswaran is a Center for Women and Gender Studies (CWGS) affiliate and member of the Medical Humanities Program at Rice University. She writes and teaches in the fields algorithmic cultures, genomic governance, surveillance studies, science and technology studies, feminist theory and ethnography, transnational and diaspora studies, ethnic and conflict, human rights, colonial law, post/colonial law and literature, comparative South Asia and Middle East studies. She has taught in Nepal and Sri Lanka, and worked in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, India, receiving Fulbright and American Institute of Indian Studies awards for her research, as well as fellowships at the University of Chicago Humanities Institute, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies. She was a past editor of the journal Feminist Studies (2013-17), and was the North American editor of Cultural Dynamics (1998-2005). She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minnesota, 1994) and Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Duke, 2010). She is also the editor of Perspectives on Modern South Asia (Blackwell, 2011), and Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East (Pennsylvannia, 2013). Her current book under contract with Duke University Press is A Thousand Genocides Now: Gujarat in the Modern Imaginary of Violence. Her new work is in surveillance studies and genomics.