Jyoti Puri

Jyoti Puri is Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. Her research focuses on the ways that states and nations regulate and govern bodies, genders and sexualities. Over the last twenty-five years, her work has emphasized matters of colonialism, transnational circuits, and racializations, while insisting on their contested aspects. Notable works include the award-winning book, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India (Duke University Press, 2016), Encountering Nationalism (Blackwell 2004), Woman, Body, Desire: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality in Post-colonial India (Routledge 1999), and special issues for leading journals. She was honored by the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association in 2021.

Continuing her efforts to decenter Eurocentric knowledge production, Puri has begun rethinking sociologies of death, leading to the article, “The Forgotten Lives of the Sociology of Death: Remembering Du Bois, Martineau and Wells” (American Sociologist 2021), and a co-edited special issue with Kimberly Juanita Brown on “Feminist Mournings” for the journal, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (forthcoming). She is working on the monograph, Migrant Death: Race, Religion and National Belonging, for the Guggenheim Fellowship.