My Biography
Svati Shah is an anthropologist of South Asia whose work examines questions of sexuality and gender in relation to class, racialization, caste, and political economy in India with a particular interest in ethnographic theory, theories of space, and the history of the left and feminist movements in postcolonial worlds. Based at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass), Svati is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and is affiliated with numerous programs such as the Department of Anthropology, the Graduate Certificate in Ethnographic Research, the Department of Afro-American Studies, the Asian American Studies Program, the Five Colleges Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice Certificate, the Center for Justice, Law and Societies, and the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project at UMass. Svati also serves as a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Development at the University of Pretoria, and as an Affiliated Researcher in the Centre for Gender Studies (SKOK) and the Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP) at the University of Bergen in Norway.
Svati earned a doctorate in Columbia University’s joint program in Anthropology and Public Health and, previously, a Master’s in Public Health degree from Emory University. Svati is an undergraduate alum of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Department of Anthropology.