Aug. 21-24, 2025 • Oregon State University • Corvallis, Oregon
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Speakers

Geeta Patel - University of Virginia

Biography
Geeta Patel is a Professor at the University of Virginia, with three degrees in science and a doctorate from Columbia University, NY in inter-disciplinary South Asian Studies (from Vedic to Urdu). She has published in both academic and popular venues on the conundrums posed by bringing gender, nation/state, sexuality, finance, science, media, capital, and aesthetics together in unforeseen ways, and translated lyric and prose from Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, and Braj. Her monographs include: Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry, which writes the history of South Asian literary modernism through its Kashmir-Urdu lyric-harbinger Miraji. Peopled by histories of sexuality, aesthetics and political movements, colonial education policies, the monograph takes on literary imaginaries ravaged by colonialism. Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy: Reflections on Sexuality, Media, Science, Finance, uses techno-intimacy as the locus for interrogating capital, science, media, and desire. Here Prof. Patel tunes into science unpredictably in order to investigate political economy, nationalism, sexuality, financialization, cinema. Four journals she has co-edited engage with her areas of expertise. “In Queery/In Theory/ In Deed” and “Area Impossible,” for GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly), “Trust and Islamic Capital” for Society and Business Review (the outcome of long-duration grants in the UK addressing Islamophobia), and “Black Women’s Radical Religious Faith Traditions,” for the African Journal on Gender and Religion (AJGR). Her most recent publications encompass a piece on the queer artist Bhupen Khakhar; prison, debt, and sailors on the Indian Ocean bringing together Adam Smith’s curious turn to music and oceanic sciences; Miraji’s translations of Geisha poetry with an essay theorizing gendered translation’s refusal of mimesis as a riposte to colonial governmentality, and re-envisioning the local political economies of black gendered diasporic faith practices. She began composing lyric under the lockdown in India, which augments the bio-fiction short pieces, and translations from Urdu, Sanskrit, Braj, and Hindi that she has been publishing since the 1990s—her collection of lyric was published by Tulana Research Center in 2022.

Current projects include: a manuscript on the Muslim woman writer Ismat Chughtai using the history of scientific realism, light, quantum and special relativity as vectors; a manuscript on fantasies embedded in advertising called “Billboard Fantasies.”  In addition, she is conducting research on and writing a series of small books on historical pensions, insurance, credit and debt. The first is on what may arguably be the first private public pension fund—the Madras Civil Fund which was started in the late 1700s and whose articulation brought Mughal and European notions of financial compensation together. This book will rewrite the commonly understood history of pensions and the welfare state – relocating it from Europe to India and backdating it by about 100 years. It will also rescript the history of capital. A longer duration project is on the ways in which the history of bacteriology and our relationship to our own bacterial life produces our everyday sense of nationalism as genocidal colonists in our own bodies.

In a symbiotic interchange with Professor Patel’s academic pursuits are her public engagements. From one of the first battered women’s shelters, to prison HIV-AIDs activism, workshops on indigeneity, race, gender, sexuality, class, to radical institutional change from kindergarten to graduate schools, tribal colleges and inner city schools in the US, working with labor unions and refugee communities fleeing violence, to developing alternate pedagogies that reformat the classroom and community engagement, engaging with queer-trans performance by communities and adolescents of color, to working with farmers and health practitioners, to fiscal support projects including designing pensions for workers, curating film, theatre, art and storytelling, these have been folded into and have underwritten her research.