Rate My Professor Manali Desai

Professor Manali Desai is Professor of Comparative and Historical Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of Newnham College. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she trained as a comparative and historical sociologist. Her research encompasses parties and political articulation, social movements, state formation, ethnic and gendered violence, caste and racialized inequalities, social theory, and post-colonial studies. Recent projects include the ESRC/GCRF-funded Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa (2020-2024), which examined gender and sexual violence in urban contexts; the Caste as Practice research group at CRASSH re-examining caste persistence in India; comparative theorizing of race across the Global South; and a study of colonial rule and long-term development in India using historical data on state infrastructural power and inequality patterns. She has led the Infrastructures of Gendered Violence network with international collaborators and produced the documentary film ‘No City for Women’ (2023).

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.