Devaleena Das, Ph.D.

Devaleena Das is a tenured Associate Professor of Body, Sexuality, and Health. She co-directs the Social and Community Health course and serves as the co-chair of the Foundation Committee (2025-2028). Her research engages transnational analyses of human bodies, health, identity, technology, and ecology, crossing the borders of culture, discipline, and geography. Her PhD dissertation (University of Calcutta) 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 by American Council of Learned Societies, University of Newcastle (Australia), University of Washington (Seattle), and University of Wisconsin–Madison. 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.

She is Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine (legacy affiliation with the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University Medical Center) and Series Editor of Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Das is the author and co-editor of five books. Her latest book  Anatomophilia. The Liberation of the Body reimagines the human body as a site of theory, relational care, ethics, and political knowledge rather than an inert object to be regulated, corrected, or erased. Moving across medical education and clinical encounters, embodied histories of migration, dance and performance, protest in the streets, visual art, and everyday bodily ritual, the book develops the theory of anatomophilia as a radical love and reverence for diverse anatomies. Currently she is working on her next monograph Medical Feminism and the Politics of Evidence and co-editing  Birthing Stories: Speaking Silence and Embodying Power in Clinical Care (Cambridge University Press, 2027)

Her scholarship appears in prestigious top-ranking journals including Feminist Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Women’s Health, the Medical Journal of Australia, Feminist Formations, and Hypatia among others. She is a 2026–2027 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow for the project "Grief as Feminist Pedagogy: Rural Care, Community, and Medical Education." She has delivered invited lectures and keynotes across Australia, India, Taiwan, the UAE, Canada, and the United States.