Inderpal Grewal

Professor Emeritus of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

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Inderpal Grewal is Professor Emeritus of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Prior to her retirement, she was also Professor in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, the South Asian Studies Council, and affiliate faculty in Anthropology and the American Studies Program. She is one of the founders of the field of transnational feminist studies, and known for her prolific work on transnational feminism, cultural theory, feminist theory, and her extensive research of post-colonialism, South Asian cultural studies, mobility and modernity, nongovernmental organizations, human rights, and citizenship.

She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press, 1996), Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke University Press, 2005), and Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First century America (Duke University Press, 2017). She has co-edited (with Caren Kaplan) Gender in a Transnational World: Introduction to Women’s Studies (Mc-Graw Hill 2001, 2005) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational: Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). She has also edited (with Victoria Bernal) Theorizing NGO’s: States, Feminism and Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2014). More recently, she has co-edited a special issue of the journal Socialtext 40:3 (with Sahana Ghosh and Samar Al-Bulushi) entitled “Security from the South: Intersections of Religion, Gender and Race.”

She is one of the editors (with Robyn Wiegman and Caren Kaplan) of the Duke University Press book series entitled Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies, a series that has been publishing critical interventions in Gender and Sexuality studies, especially with attention to histories of colonialism, modernity and empire and the global South.

Her ongoing publications and projects include essays on feminist theory, on European and American imperialisms, on the visual culture of gender, violence and counterinsurgency in India, and a book project on memoirs of bureaucrats in postcolonial India. Her most recent essays include “Screaming for the State: The Work of a Rape Documentary, published in Jadaliyya in 2026, and “Towards a ‘Diaspora Arts’: Migration, Labor, Aesthetics in the work of Rupy C. Tut and Jasleen Kaur” in Sikh Formations, col.21, no. 2, 2026.

Her essay “Towards a ‘Diaspora Arts’: Migration, Labor, Aesthetics in the work of Rupy C. Tut and Jasleen Kaur”, was published in Sikh Formations, vol 21:3-4, 2025.

Professor Grewal’s research on the security state was featured in a short film about the city of New Delhi, “Surveillance City,” ( dir. Harjant Gill, 2026) hosted on the website of the journal of radical geography, Antipode. https://antipodeonline.org/2026/05/13/surveillance-city/.

“The brief (for the film) was to create something ‘to further bridge the gaps between academic scholarship and public knowledge, to provide social justice-oriented educators and activists with resources for their work, and to foster critical thinking through creative expression’. Directed by Harjant Gill and Pearl Sandhu and featuring Professor Inderpal Grewal, Surveillance City takes viewers on a journey through contemporary Delhi, narrating a city marked by the extreme inequality resultant of decades of neoliberalism, and highlighting the insidious work of an authoritarian state deploying surveillance and securitisation measures to govern diverse populations and temper unrest. It’s a powerful meditation on masculinism and militarism, populism and patriarchy, the aesthetics and affects of security, nationalism and religion, policing and the law, discourses of terror, fear of the other, the role of the media, but also dissent, protest, and the prospects of democracy in a postcolonial state.

This is a short film of great educational, activist, and artistic value, and we invite you, the viewer, to share it widely and put it to work in your teaching, research, and beyond. Surveillance City can be viewed below. The film is accompanied a lively essay, “Delhi’s Security Aesthetics: Surveillance, Securitization, and Advanced Neoliberalism in India”, and set of further readings.”