Anupama Rao is Professor of History (Barnard) and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and spent over nine years as Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, between 2012-2019.

She is completing a monograph entitled Ambedkar in America; a forthcoming volume, the Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar is slated for publication; and she has recently introduced and edited Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R. B. More (Leftword Books, 2019). She has also edited Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (2018), which was a sequel of sorts to the well received, and much circulated, 2006 volume, Gender and Caste.

In addition to numerous essays, she is also the author of The Caste Question, a work of social and intellectual history, which has received critical acclaim for transforming the field’s understanding of the relationship between caste and democracy, and for its contributions to political thought and history more broadly.

She directs the Ambedkar Initiative, whose vision includes: situating Ambedkar as a global thinker, and among the twentieth century’s most important voices in the radical democratic tradition; engaged pedagogy; and public outreach. Most of all, it aims to resuscitate the links, both implicit and explicit, between the world’s oldest and the world’s largest democracies.