Department of Women's Studies

New Women's Studies Faculty Members

Ariane Cruz-Associate Professor of Women's Studies. Her research and teaching interests include images of black female sexuality, black visuality and race and representation.

Women's Studies welcomes Papori Bora, Post Doctoral Scholar. She has a PhD in Feminist Studies with a minor in Development Studies and Social Change from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research engages with the interweaving themes of postcolonial and transnational feminist studies, South Asian historiography, feminist political theory, law and citizenship and human rights to examine questions of the political from a feminist perspective. Her recent work titled “Between the Human, the Citizen and the Tribal: Reading Feminist Politics in India’s Northeast” has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Her current research is focused on two broad themes. First, she has been interested in developing a critical engagement between the concepts of performativity and postcoloniality, through which to articulate the limits of citizenship and representative democracy as ways of belonging and accounting for difference in the post-colonial nation-state. Second, she has been working on a book on the intellectual and political history of India’s “Northeast,” which traces the political history that has ensued from the British colonial strategy of separating the region, politically and administratively, from the rest of colonial India, through the Inner Line regulation that created the categories of the “governed” and the “ungovernable,” and how the specters of these categories haunt the functioning of post-colonial citizenship in the region.