Ruchi Chaturvedi
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Hunter College
Ruchi Chaturvedi received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2007. Ruchi’s research focuses on questions of political violence, popular politics and its contentious relationship with the ideology and institutions of liberal democracy. The lifeworlds of local level political workers of the Marxist Left and Hindu Right in Kerala, South India, their acts and experiences of violence, and the criminal courts where these workers have been tried have been Ruchi’s key ethnographic resources so far. Duke University Press has contracted to publish her book Democratic Dark Side: The Work of Politics, Violence, and Law in South India.
Ruchi’s second project concentrates on so-called lumpens active in popular and party politics in various towns of North India. At Hunter College, she teaches courses on Power and Politics, Anthropology of War, Legal Anthropology and Violence and Ethnic Conflict in South Asia.
