Ashwini Tambe

Dr. Ashwini Tambe is professor of history and director of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University.  She is a scholar of gender and law in South Asia and of transnational feminist theory.  Over the past two decades, she has written about how South Asian societies regulate sexual practices.  Her 2009 book, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (University of Minnesota Press), traces how law-making and law-enforcement practices shaped the rise of the city’s red-light district.  Her 2019 book, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational Approach to Sexual Maturity Laws (University of Illinois Press), examines the legal paradoxes in age standards for girls’ sexual consent in India.  She has also published the co-edited volumes, Transnational Feminist Itineraries (with Millie Thayer) and The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia (with Harald Fischer-Tiné).  Her most recent journal articles have appeared in Feminist Formations, American Historical Review, and South Asia.  She is also the editorial director of Feminist Studies, the oldest U.S. journal of feminist interdisciplinary scholarship.

Dr. Tambe holds a PhD in international relations from American University, Washington, D.C., and has taught at the University of Maryland and the University of Toronto.  She has supervised doctoral dissertations on a wide range of topics, including the history of women’s studies; sports and gender; and religion and sexuality.  In 2018, she received the Graduate Mentor of the Year Award from the University of Maryland.

Dr. Tambe’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring feminist debates on appropriate punishment for sexual harm, with a focus on the impact of digital activism.  This is an important time in India to pose questions about such punishment since a new legal code, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, recently replaced the Indian Penal Code.  At this time of intense deliberation over regulating gender justice, Dr. Tambe is based in a premier legal education site, the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), researching cases of digital retribution, defamation lawsuits, and caste barriers to seeking justice in cases of sexual violence.