Veena Das

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author or editor of ten books. Her latest book is entitled Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, 2007. Dr. Das has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including the prestigious Andrez Retzius Award of the Swedish Society for Geography and Anthropology. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academy for Scientists of Developing Countries and has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago. Before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2000, she taught at the New School University and for more than thirty years at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Veena Das’s research covers a range of fields. She is passionately interested in the question of how ethnography generates concepts; how we might treat philosophical and literary traditions from India and other regions as generative of theoretical and practical understanding of the world; how to render the texture and contours of everyday life; and the way everyday and the event are joined together in the making of the normal and the critical. Her work on collective violence and urban transformations has appeared in many anthologies.