WGSS Welcomes Professor Inderpal Grewal

The Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is delighted to welcome and introduce Professor Inderpal Grewal, who joins us this fall as Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with secondary appointments in American Studies and Anthropology and a formal affiliation with the South Asian Studies Council.  Professor Grewal comes to Yale from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where she was UCI Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow and played a key role in building the Program in Women’s Studies into a full-fledged Department.   At the same time, she provided visionary leadership in launching a remarkable new interdisciplinary PhD program in Culture and Theory.   

Professor Grewal’s current works in progress include a book-length monograph, titled The Gender of Security, on relations among security formations, the state, gender, and feminisms in contemporary India and the United States.  She is co-editor and contributing author to the field-shaping 1994 volume, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press; with Caren Kaplan), which was responsible for inaugurating the new field of transnational feminist cultural studies, a focus she has pursued and refined in her most recent book, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke University Press; 2005).  Hailed as “an important intervention by one of the foremost feminist postcolonial critics in the United States academy today,” this latest volume reconfigures transnational theory, attending especially closely to South Asian and American contexts and interactivity.  Among Professor Grewal’s other publications of special note are her 1996 book titled Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Culture of Travel (Duke University Press) and a field-shaping text designed for the undergraduate and graduate classroom, An Introduction to Women's Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages; 2001 [2005]; co-authored and edited with Caren Kaplan).  Professor Grewal serves on the Editorial and Advisory Boards of journals critical to this field of scholarship, including Women’s Studies Quarterly; Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory; Studies in Travel Writing; Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies; and Meridians: femininisms, race, transnationalism.  With Caren Kaplan and Robyn Wiegman, she is series editor for “New Wave in Women’s Studies,” a book series published by Duke University Press. 

Professor Grewal is committed to collaboration as an intellectual ideal.  She understands scholarship as a community of thought---and herself as part of a conversation that’s ongoing and moving fast, elaborating a transnational interdisciplinary shape for the future of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  We are delighted that she joins us in this conversation, and we invite you to extend, with us, your warmest welcome.