Priya Kandaswamy, Associate Professor

Office: AL 354 | Email: [email protected]

Priya Kandaswamy’s research and teaching explore how race, gender, sexuality, and class have shaped ideas of national belonging and practices of state violence in the United States. She is the author of Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform (Duke University Press, 2021), which documents how constructions of gendered citizenship articulated to curtail Black freedom during the Reconstruction Era continue to haunt more contemporary debates about public assistance and economic inequality in the United States. Bringing together insights from queer studies, feminist studies, and ethnic studies, her work is engaged with and deeply indebted to historical and contemporary movements for welfare rights, domestic workers’ rights, reproductive justice, prison abolition, and liberatory education. Prior to joining the faculty at San Diego State University, she was professor and chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Mills College and the academic program director at Mt. Tamalpais College, a community college that serves incarcerated students at San Quentin State Prison.