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Srimati Basu is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Anthropology, and a member of the Committee on Social Theory and the Asia Center Affiliates. She has an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Ohio State University in Cultural Studies/ Anthropology/ Women's Studies, and her teaching, research and community work interests include Legal Anthropology, Women in Development, Feminist Jurisprudence, South Asia, Feminist Theory and Methodology, Work, Property and Violence Against Women. Following an ethnographic study of feminist legal reform, marriage, courts, mediation, rape and domestic violence law, she has begun fieldwork on men's rights activits, marriage and domestic violence, the subject of her 2013-14 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship in India.

Dr. Basu's research on Indian women and inheritance laws has been published in She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property and Propriety (SUNY Press, 1999), and she is also the editor of the Dowry and Inheritance volume in the Kali for Women series Issues in Indian Feminism. Her monograph The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India (University of California Press, 2015) deals with marriage, divorce, violence and mediation, based in part on ethnographic observation of family courts, police stations, and mediation sessions. The anthology Conjugality Unbound: Sexual Economies, State Regulation and the Marital Form in India (Women Unlimited, 2015, coedited with Lucinda Ramberg) continues the critical exploration of marriage and conjugality.

Some other pieces on property, law, marriage, violence and popular culture appear in anthologies including Sexuality Studies: Oxford India Studies in Contemporary Society (2013), New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities (2012), Negotiating Spaces:  Legal Domains, Gender Concerns and Community Constructs (2012), Histories of Intimacy and Situated Ethnography (2010), Dowry: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice, (2010), Gender At Work In Economic Life (2003), Signposts: Gender in Post-Independence India (1999), and Religion and Personal Law in India (2001), and in journals including Signs, Feminist Studies, Frontiers, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Law Culture and Humanities, FeministMedia Studies, Journal of Legal Pluralism, Canadian Journal of Women and Law and Economic and Political Weekly. Dr. Basu also writes for the Ms. Magazine blog and has written for India Today and Kafila, and participated recently in the UN Expert Group Meeting on "Family policy development: achievements and challenges."

South Asia Seminar