April 17, 2012 STAFF/STU

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Today: The Donald W. Suopis Inaugural Lecture Series

The Political Science Department presents the Donald W. Suopis Inaugural Lecture Series, “Queer Cities and Rural Uprisings? Mapping New Discourses of Modernity in India,” with Svati P. Shah on Tuesday, April 17, at 5 p.m. in AD 226.

Shah is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and an adjunct in the Department of Anthropology. She completed her Ph.D. in 2006 in Columbia University’s joint anthropology and public health program. Her dissertation research, conducted ethnographically, focused on migration and sex work among day wage construction workers in the city of Mumbai. She has published work on sex work, migration, LGBTQ movements and the organized left, and the politics of the discourse on human trafficking in a range of scholarly and progressive journals and periodicals. These include Gender and History, Cultural Dynamics, Rethinking Marxism, and SAMAR: South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection (http://samarmagazine.org/).

Shah’s monograph, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai, is forthcoming in 2013 from Duke University Press. Her current research projects address sex workers’ unionization efforts, migration and displacement of rural workers in western India, and India’s LGBT movement.

The Suopis Lecture Series is to be an annual public lecture sponsored by the JCU Political Science Department in memory of Donald William Suopis ’70, for the purpose of hosting a keynote speaker whose area of expertise, academic study and/or professional pursuit centers on those issues that were of special interest to Donald W. Suopis.

This event is free and open to the public.