Faculty Directory

Research Interests

Anjali Arondekar is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founding Co-Director of the Center for South Asian Studies, UCSC. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, colonialism and historiography, with a focus on South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality's History (Duke University Press, 2023), grows out of her interest in the archival figurations of sexuality, caste and empire in colonial British and Portuguese India.

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D., English, University of Pennsylvania
B.A., College Scholar, Cornell University

Honors, Awards and Grants

For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009
Winner of the 2010 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies from the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association.
http://dukeupress.typepad.com/dukeupresslog/2011/01/duke-university-press-award-winners-at-mla.html

Selected Publications

• "For the Record:..." Winner of the 2010 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies from the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association.
• For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009

•  Abundance: Sexuality’s History, Series:Theory Q, Duke University Press, 2023 

Edited Collections:

• Guest Co- Editor with Cannon Schmitt and Nancy Henry, “Victorian Investments,” Special Issue, Victorian Studies, Vol. 45: 1, Autumn 2002
• Guest Co-Editor with Geeta Patel, “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” Special Issue, GLQ: Gay Lesbian Quarterly, Vol. 22:2, March 2016, 151-17
• Guest Co-Editor with Sherene Seikaly, “Pandemic Histories: Migrations and Meditations,” Special Issue, History of the Present, April 2023

Articles in Professional Journals:

• Curator, Dossier, “Andolan Imaginaries,” Social Text, December 2021
• … “Supply Chain: Social Text, December 2021, 103-119.
• “There is Always More: Sexuality’s Archives,” Foam #59 Histories – The Archival Issue, June 2021, Foam, Amsterdam, 2021, 89-97.
• “The Sex of History, or Object/Matters,” History Workshop Journal, Spring 2020, 1-7.
• "Itinerant Sex." QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 5, no. 3 (2018): 148-52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/qed.5.3.0148.
• “What More Remains: Slavery, Sexuality, South Asia History of the Present, Fall 2016, Vol. 6:2, 146-154
• “Thinking Sex with Geopolitics,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 44.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2016), 332-35
• “Queering Archives: A Roundtable,” Radical History Review, Vol. 122, Winter 2015, 211-231
• “Timepass: A (Queer) View from South Asia,” Special Issue, “Queer and Now,” The Writing Instructor, Spring 2015
• “In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 25:3, 2015, 98-121
• “The Object as Usual,” Feminist Formations, Vol. 25:3, Winter 2013, 143-48
• "Border/Line Sex: Queer Postcolonialities or How Race Matters outside the U.S.," Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 7 (2): 2005, 235-249.
• "Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive," Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 14: 1-2, Winter/Spring 2005, 10-27.
• "Geopolitics Alert!" GLQ, 10(2), 2004, 236-40.
• Co-Author with Cannon Schmitt and Nancy Henry, "Victorian Investments," Special Issue, Victorian Studies, Vol. 45:1, Autumn 2002, 7-16
• “’Too Fatally Present’: The Crisis of Anglo-Indian Literature,” Colby Quarterly, Volume 37: 2, June 2001, 145-163
• "Reading (Other)Wise: Transgressing the Rhetoric of Colonization," Symploke, Vol. 1 (Summer 1993): 177-94

Chapters in Books:

• “Mehfil: An Afterword,” Pakistan Desires, (Durham: Duke University Press, March 2023).
• “Telling Tales: Archives of the Geopolitical,” in Daniel Marshal and Zeb Tortorici, Eds. Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, July 2022), 164-182.
• “On Differences,” in Lisa Bjorkman, Ed. Bombay Brokers: Ethnography in the Interregnum (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 233-241
• “Caste, Sexuality and the Kala of the Archive” in Anupama Rao, Ed. Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2018), 109-35. 
• "Subject to Sex: A Small History of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj" in Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose, eds. South Asian Feminisms, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) 244-266.
• “Time’s Corpus: On Temporality, Sexuality and the Indian Penal Code” in Jarrod Hayes, William Spurlin, eds. Comparatively Queer: Crossing Times, Crossing Cultures (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 143-156
• “Pornography and Its Dis/Contents: A Roundtable Discussion with Anjali Arondekar, Richard Fung and Sylvia Chong” in Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger, eds. Embodying Asian/American Sexualities (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009) 29-41.
• "Lingering Pleasures, Perverted Texts: Reading Colonial Desire in Kipling’s Anglo-India Fiction” in Richard Ruppel, ed. Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) 65-89
• Review/ Review Essays:
• “Go (Away) West!” State of the Field Review, GLQ, 28: 3, June 2022, 463-72.
• “The Cult of Masculinity,” Review Essay, The Book Review, Vol. XXXVI: 6, June 2012, 23
• “Loitering as a Feminist Right,” Review Essay, Biblio: A Review of Books, March-April 2012, 28
• "The Voyage Out: Transacting Sex under Globalization," Feminist Studies , Vol. 33: 2, Summer 2007, 299-311.
• "Entangled Histories," Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Vol. 41:31, August 5, 2006, 3409-3411.
• “Bodies That Matter: Middle-Class Women and India,” Book Review, Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 60:1, February 2001, 270-71
• "The Problem of Strategy: How to Read Race, Class and Gender in the Colonial Context," Review Essay, Postmodern Culture, Summer 1996

INTERVIEWS:

• The Navhind Times: Goa needs much more work in the areas of gender and sexuality: Anjali Arondekar
• Archival Genealogies of Caste and Sexuality: Interview, Roundtable India