LEELA FERNANDES, Professor, received her B.A. and B.S.E. from the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She holds a joint appointment with the Department of Women's Studies. Her primary interests include culture and politics, theories of political economy, labor studies, the politics of globalization, South Asian studies, feminist theory and comparative women's movements. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University, and the American Cuncil for Learned Societies.

Recent publications include:

Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

"Transforming Feminist Practice: Non-Violence, Social Justice and the Possibilities of a Spiritualized Feminism," (A. Lute Books, 2003).

"India's New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Ecnomic Reform," (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Selected Articles:

"Culture, Structure, and Working Class Politics," (Economic and Political Weekly, 1998).

"Reading 'India's Bandit Queen': A Trans/National Feminist Perspective on the Discrepancies of Representation," (Signs: A Journal of Women, Culture, and Society, 1999).

"Nationalizing 'the Global': Media Images, Economic Reform and the Middle Class in India," (Media, Culture and Society, 2000).

"Restructuring the new Middle Class in Liberalizing India," (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2000).

"The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the Restructuring of Urban Space," (Urban Studies, 2004).

"Class, Space and the State in India: The Politics of Empire in Comparative Perspective," (In Gonzalez, Ed., Labor Versus Empire, 2004).

"The Boundaries of Terror: Feminism, Human. Rights and the Politics of Global Crisis," (In Hesford and Kozol, Eds., Just Advocacy, 2005).

Leela is currently conducting research in the field of religion and politics.