Faculty

Leslie Salzinger is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political...

Aarti Sethi is assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book that examines cash-crop agricultural economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society. She is...

I am an environmental historian of South Asia. My research and teaching are concerned with the place of the environment in global history since the eighteenth century, with a dual emphasis on how environments have been transformed by modern regimes of science, economy, law, and infrastructure, and the ways in which such transformations have come to shape global politics.

My book in progress, Subterranean Lands: India, Fossil Fuels, and the Limits of the Earth (under contract with Princeton University Press), is an environmental history of the making of India’s fossil economy. The...

Barbara Spackman, Ph.D. Yale University, is a distinguished professor emerita of Italian studies and comparative literature, and former Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature. She works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature and culture, with special interests in decadence, the cultural production of the fascist period, feminist theory, travel writing and Italian Orientalism. She has published on topics as diverse as Macaronic poetry, film of the fascist period, the rhetoric of sickness at the fin de siècle, Italian futurism, contemporary feminist...