Geeta H. Patel

Geeta Patel is an associate professor for Women's Studies at Wellesley College. She joined the department in 1994 from the University of Iowa where she had served in the administration and also taught in the Department of Asian Literature and the Program in Comparative Literature.

Trained in South Asian studies, Geeta Patel teaches courses on South Asian gender, history and aesthetics, cross-cultural sexuality, and history of sexuality, and incorporates into her courses issues on political economy, race, and class. She is on the MLA committee for sexuality, involved with a national group of women who are producing work jointly on gender and globalization, and has served on national Ford Foundation committees for institutional change. She has reviewed for journals including Signs, Public Culture, and Meridians.

She holds a B.A. from Wellesley in 1980 and a B.S. from Delhi University. Her Ph.D. on Urdu, Hindi and Sankrit was an interdisciplinary degree from an Area Studies program at Columbia University.

Her recent book, Literary Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, colonialism and desire in Miraji's Urdu Poetry, from Stanford University Press has been reissued as an Indian edition by Manohar Press. She co-edited an issue of GLQ, and is currently writing her next book Gender and the Global Nation, and co-editing a collection on globalization and sexuality with Anjali Arondekar. She has also contributed articles, essays, and reviews to a wide range of scholarly journals.

Profile last updated: 8/01

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Last Modified: November 9, 2001