Rate My Professor Manali Desai

Desai served as Head of the Department of Sociology from 2020 to 2024 and has been appointed Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences effective 1 October 2025. She received the 2019 Pilkington Teaching Prize in recognition of her teaching impact. Her key publications include the book State Formation and Radical Democracy in India, 1860-1990 (Routledge, 2007); States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (co-edited with Partha Chatterjee and Parama Roy, Zubaan/Cambridge University Press, 2009); Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society (co-edited with Cedric de Leon and Cihan Tuğal, Stanford University Press, 2015), which received the ASA Political Sociology Section Honorable Mention; and the forthcoming Handbook of Indian Politics and Society (co-edited with Indrajit Roy, Cambridge University Press, 2026). Notable articles comprise ‘Gendered Violence and the Body Politic in India’ (New Left Review, 2016), ‘Development Discourse and Popular Articulations in Urban Gujarat’ (Critical Asian Studies, 2016, with Indrajit Roy), and ‘Crisis, Conjunctures and Turning Points in Historical Sociology’ (Social Science History, 2023). She teaches courses such as Introduction to Sociology, Modern Societies II: Global Social Problems and Dynamics of Resistance, Racism, Race, and Ethnicity, and supervises graduate students in postcolonial politics, gender, ethno-nationalism, and violence.