Professor Manali Desai received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles where she trained as a comparative and historical sociologist. Her work encompasses the areas of parties and political articulation, social movements, state formation, ethnic and gendered violence, caste and racialized inequalities, social theory, and post-colonial studies.
Her most recent research project, funded by the ESRC/GCRF Large Grant (£1.76 million) was a comparative qualitative project titled Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa. Manali's first book State Formation and Radical Democracy in India, 1860-1990 (2007) was a historical analysis of the emergence of two different welfare regimes in India where social democratic parties have ruled consistently since independence.
She has also published her research in the American Journal of Sociology, Signs, Social Forces, Social Science History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Historical Sociology and Critical Asian Studies, among others. Manali has co-edited books titled States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (2009) and Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society (2015) and the Cambridge Companion to Indian Politics and Society (forthcoming 2026).
Her current research examines caste and racialized inequalities in India in comparative perspective. She is leading a research group titled Caste as Practice (Caste as Practice: Persistence and Transformations - CRASSH), which re-examines debates about the persistence of caste amidst ongoing social and political transformation in India. She is also involved in a comparative project of theorizing ‘race’ across the Global South (Thinking Us – Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation).
