CURRICULUM VITAE

Soma Chaudhuri

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BIOGRAPHY

Soma Chaudhuri is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. She is the Co-Director of Center for Gender in Global Context, at Michigan State University, where she leads the global research portfolio. Her research lies at the intersection of gender, development, social movements and violence. Using qualitative datasets that draws from contemporary incidents of witch hunts, cases of domestic violence among others, her work examines how community and household-level violence is used to legitimize structural and institutional gender inequalities, and how such dynamics disproportionately constrain women’s lives. Relatedly she studies the role of non-state actors in designing and implementing empowerment initiatives aimed at countering such gender-based inequalities, with particular attention to how these programs shape women’s agency in efforts to reduce violence in their lives, the conditions under which they succeed, and the reasons they sometimes fall short.

Her current projects include a co-edited volume with scholars across Africa and South Asia that investigates the political, social and legal challenges surrounding the implementation of anti-rape laws in the Global South, and a special issue on witch hunts for Journal of Gender Studies, with Jane Ward. She is also working on a book manuscript that traces how women living within, and, in some cases, moving beyond, abusive relationships create livability through spaces of dignity, meaning, and tactical agency. Drawing on the support of local women’s networks who draw on tool of negotiations embedded in intersectional consciousness, the book illuminates the various pathways toward livability survivors undertake, while living amid profound structural constraint. Her research has been funded by several grants including those from the National Science Foundation Social Science Research Council and National Endowment of Humanities.

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LINKS

https://somachaudhuri.com/

Center for Gender in Global Context (GenCen)

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RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Negotiating with Intersectional Consciousness: Women Leaders and the Everyday Politics of Advocacy in India. (with Alison Colby) Mobilization: An International Journal (forthcoming)

Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward. WITCH HUNTS EVERYWHERE: A Feminist Re-Mapping of Misogyny and Contemporary Anti-Witch Violence. Journal of Gender Studies (forthcoming)

The Witch Studies Reader, 2025. (co-edited volume with Jane Ward) The Witch Studies Reader (dukeupress.edu). Reviewed in: Gender & Society; Journal of the American Academy of Religion; Choice; Irish Times; Ms Magazine

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