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Dr. Devaleena Das is a tenured Associate Professor whose research engages transnational analyses of human bodies, health, identity, technology, and ecology, crossing the borders of culture, discipline, and geography. She earned her PhD from the University of Calcutta, where her dissertation examined the spatio-temporal politics of the body and health in the life narratives of Aboriginal and settler women in Australia. During her doctoral studies, she held a research fellowship at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, under the supervision of Professor Carole Ferrier. Dr. Das has also been awarded research fellowships at the University of Newcastle (Australia), the University of Washington (Seattle), and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she explored Global South women’s experiences of body, sexuality, and health. For over a decade, she has taught in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs across the United States, focusing on feminist ethics and the dilemmas of transhumanism, particularly its paradoxical promise to overcome disease, aging, and suffering while reducing corporeality to a “data body” within clinical and surveillance systems. Das is the author and co-editor of five books, and her forthcoming monograph, Anatomophilia: The Liberation of the Body (SUNY Press), offers a transnational introduction to decolonial epistemologies in body studies, centering the lived experiences and agency of marginalized bodies in the Global South. Among her various awards and honors, some significant mentions include the Educational Innovation Award from the UMN Medical School, the Innovation Impact Case Award (the highest research award from the University’s Research and Innovation Office), recognition as an Outstanding Professor and Researcher of International Renown by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the Australia-India Youth Dialogue Leadership Award (declined).
Dr. Das is a body theorist whose transdisciplinary research explores theories of human bodies, health and wellness based on real life narratives, ethnography, field research, literature, art, religious myths, and performances to initiate an ethical and respectful understanding of human bodies and contributes toward corporeal justice in healthcare system. Dr. Das practices multidisciplinary methodologies: from traditional critical analysis of textual and visual narratives, oral history, ethnographical field research, to non-traditional autobiographical story-telling, experiential and applied learning, and creative participation. Her area of research includes Body, Sexuality and Health studies, Social and Structural Determinants of Health, Obstetric and Perinatal Health and Trauma, Artificial Intelligence and Health, Ecology, Sexuality and Health Humanities,,Transnationalism, Migration, and Diasporic Sexuality and politics of knowledge formation. Dr. Das has delivered various invited lectures, plenary and keynote addresses on body, sexuality and health in various countries across the globe including Australia, Canada, USA, Taiwan, UAE. Writing across transdisciplinary fields, her scholarship spans several geographical and cultural boundaries and her articles have been published in flagship peer-reviewed journals including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), Feminist Studies (John Hopkins University Press), Hecate (Queensland Univ Press), Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism (Duke University Press), Feminist Formations (John Hopkins Univ Press), South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Taylor and Francis) among others. Dr. Das is currently the editor- in chief of Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine and is one of the Series Editors of Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing.