Rate My Professor Anjali Arondekar

Anjali Arondekar is Professor of Feminist Studies and Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, contributing to the Social Science faculty through her work in humanities, literature, and history. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. as College Scholar from Cornell University. From 2020 to 2024, Arondekar served as Founding Director of the Center for South Asian Studies, the first area studies center at UCSC explicitly focused on economic and social justice in South Asia and its diaspora. Her research engages the comparative poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with emphasis on South Asian and Indian Ocean studies. Key methodological concerns include archives as historical evidence, exemplarity in reading evidence, and geopolitics in determining reading contexts. This scholarship bridges area studies genealogies with Anglo-American literary and cultural histories, addressing race, gender, and sexuality via South Asia's multilingual colonial and national formations. Arondekar reads and writes across disciplines such as history, literature, and law, alongside field formations in area studies and queer/sexuality studies.

Arondekar authored For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009; Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), which interrogates sexuality's pursuit of truth in colonial archives, spatial and racial logics of such returns, and the resulting recuperative hermeneutics; it won the 2010 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies from the Modern Language Association's GL/Q Caucus. Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023; Orient Blackswan, 2023), posits sexuality's radical abundance against archival loss narratives, drawing on plentiful archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, a caste-oppressed devadasi collective, to challenge subaltern histories of vulnerability and precarity while centering sexuality in post/colonial and anti/caste contexts. She co-edited Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies in GLQ (2016, with Geeta Patel) and Pandemic Histories in History of the Present (2022, with Sherene Seikaly). Arondekar teaches courses including Feminist Theories, Topics in Queer/Race Studies, Topics in Postcolonial Studies, Empire and Sexuality, and History of Sexuality. Her ongoing project, Oceanic Sex: Archives of Caste and Indenture, examines indenture archives from Mauritius as an area impossible epistemology.