Basuli Deb

Based in New York City, Basuli Deb is a Professorial Research Associate at the SOAS School of Law, Gender and Media. In 2016 the United States granted Deb permanent residency in the “extraordinary ability” category for her scholarly expertise. Currently engaged with Columbia Law School’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, she has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature & Society as well as Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. Deb has been invited as a lifetime scholar at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University where she previously held a Global Scholar position and co- founded the international Research Group on Dalit and Adivasi Studies. She is part of the north-south editorial collective’s initiative on “Decolonial Feminist Publishing” at the Gender Centre of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Invited by Ginetta Candelario, the editor of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Deb is now co-editing with Candelario a special issue titled Indigenous Feminisms Across the World. The issue attempts a productive decentering of the Western Hemisphere through voices articulating other transnational, regional, and local experiences that are regularly marginalized in conversations about decoloniality and indigeneity in the Americas.

Deb’s publications include a monograph Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture, multiple sole authored peer reviewed articles, and a co-edited special issue and anthologies. She is looking forward to collaborations with SOAS faculty across all three areas—law, gender, and media. At present, she is completing revisions of a book manuscript before submitting it to a university press. The manuscript is a transnational feminist rapprochement between decolonial and postcolonial studies examined through the connected materialities of indigenous and transmigrant lives. It uses multispecies feminism as a theoretical frame to examine gendered literary, visual, and media archives from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In another monograph project, Deb is combining a transnational feminist analytic with feminist science studies to forge a critical conversation between climate change and pandemics. She engages with literature, media, visual culture, and activist ephemera to extrapolate from them a planetary lesson for the human. Deb is also working on two journal submissions. The first of these articles aims to generate possibilities for women and children in international human rights by examining conflict zones in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa for legal, philosophical, and political reconceptualization of reproductive violence. Drawing on Bengali literature and media from India, the second article explores indigenous women’s activism against
environmental and sexual violence in India’s forestlands to foreground indigenous feminist ways of knowing, seeing, and being in the face of various eras of settler formations.

Deb has been elected/selected to serve in various international and national feminist leadership capacities, such as the MLA Delegate Assembly, the Women of Color Leadership Project of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), and as a founding member of NWSA’s South Asian Feminist Caucus. She has delivered keynotes at international conferences, was invited to offer recommendations at the sixty-third UN Commission on the Status of Women to address the Rohingya genocide, serves as an invited speaker on academic and public debates at campuses, consulates, and foundations across the US and abroad, and is an external expert for various organizations. Deb has partnered with NYC Mayor’s Commission on Gender Equity to promote UN’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. She is a member of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women that supports the work of the UN CSW and UN Women, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Indian American Intellectuals’ Forum invested in US foreign policy dialogues.

Proposals for collaborations, inquiries from media, academics, students, related professionals and organizations are welcome at debbasuli2015@gmail.com