Srila Roy

Srila Roy is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Before joining Wits, she was a lecturer in sociology at the University of Nottingham, after obtaining a PHD in sociology from the University of Warwick. Her long-standing research interests and expertise is in the field of transnational and decolonial feminist studies.

Professor Roy is the author of Remembering Revolution, one of the first full-length monograph's on the gender and sexual politics of India's Naxalbari revolution, a predecessor of contemporary Maoist struggles in the region. She is also the editor of New South Asian Feminisms, which has been translated into Turkish, and co-editor, with Alf Gunvald Nilsen, of New Subaltern Politics. Her second monograph, Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India was published by Duke University Press in 2022. In the same year, she co-edited, with colleagues at Wits and in India, a volume of essays on #MeToo in India and South Africa, called Intimacy and Injury (Manchester University Press). She is currently writing a collection of essays on decolonising higher education in the Global South, through the lens and promises of transnational feminism.

Professor Roy is an editor of the journal, Feminist Theory, and associate editor of the gender and sexuality section of Sociology Compass. She has held visiting fellowships at the Delhi School of Economics, the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, the University of Johannesburg, the Universidad de Valparaiso in Chile, the Universities of Bergen and Oslo, Norway, and been a writing fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS) and at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy. In 2022, she was a Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair in Sexualities Studies at the University of Sydney. She is also the recipient of the inaugural FTGS Global South Feminist Scholar Award from the International Studies Association (ISA).

She has contributed to a variety of media outlets - Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, Dissent, The Wire - on issues of gender and sexuality in the Global South, and regularly writes for the Times Higher Education. You can find her writings here: https://www.srilaroy.com/