Raka Ray has a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College (1985) and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1993). She is the Dean of the Social Sciences and a professor of sociology and South and Southeast Asia studies at the University of California, Berkeley. An award-winning mentor and teacher, she is the former chair of the Institute of South Asia Studies (2003–2012), the Department of Sociology (2012–2015), and the Academic Senate Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations.
Ray is much in demand as a speaker on issues ranging from gender and feminist theory, postcolonial sociology, contemporary politics in the US and India, and her current project on the transformations in gender wrought by the decline of traditional fields of work for men. Ray’s publications include Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (University of Minnesota Press, 1999; and in India, Kali for Women, 2000), Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics, co-edited with Mary Katzenstein (Rowman and Littlefeld, 2005), Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity and Class in India, with Seemin Qayum (Stanford, 2009), The Handbook of Gender (OUP India, 2011), Both Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, coedited with Amita Baviskar (Routledge, 2011), The Social Life of Gender (Sage, 2017) coedited with Jennifer Carlson and Abigail Andrews, and many articles and op-eds.