Visiting Associate Professor
Ph.D., Cornell University
Fields: gender, global capitalism, neoliberalism, labor, transnational feminism, social reproduction, ethnography, global South, post/decolonial theory and epistemologies, India.
Contact Information
Email: jlal@holycross.edu
Office Phone: 508-793-3622 Office: Beaven 213 PO Box: 50A
Biography
Jayati Lal is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her scholarly interests include transnational feminism, post and decolonial studies, neoliberalism and capitalism in the Global South, South Asia and India, the sociology of gender and sexuality, and labor studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University, Master’s degrees in Sociology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and a BA (Honors) in Psychology from Indraprastha College at Delhi University. She has previously taught in gender studies and sociology at Cornell University, Boston College, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, American University, Syracuse University, Wake Forest University, Ambedkar University Delhi, and Seoul National University. She was an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow at John’s Hopkins University and has been a fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Study in Delhi. Her research has been published in Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, Critical Sociology, and The Sociological Review, among other venues. She was a co-Director and co-principal investigator for the feminist digital archival project on Global Feminisms at the University of Michigan, which produced an audiovisual record of interviews with feminists, women’s studies scholars and movement activists from several countries. In addition to conducting interviews for this project, she co-directed the India site, and provided a recent update on India as part of the podcase series, Contextualizing Feminist Voices.
Her ongoing book project, Making Factory Women: The Labor of Gender in Late Twentieth-Century Indian Capitalism, develops a postcolonial materialist feminist approach that integrates historical, archival, and long-term ethnographic research on women factory workers in New Delhi. Other current research projects focus on gender, consumer culture, and constructions of neoliberal selfhood among the middle class in North India.
Courses:
- SOCL 101: The Sociological Perspective
- SOCL 277: Gender and Society