Fall 2023 Seminar Series: Jyoti Puri (Simmons University)
Tomorrow is our Fall Seminar Series talk and visit with Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology at Simmons University, from 12:00 to 1:15pm in our department’s seminar room (241). We hope to see you there!
Wednesday September 20th, Jyoti Puri, The Many Lives of Migrant Death: Toward a Critical Sociology of Loss, 12:00 pm, 96-100 Cummington Mall, Room 241.
Beginning with a 1907 cremation image, this talk provides an overview of a project centered on death rituals among South Asian migrants in North America. It outlines the project’s focus, scope, and intellectual and political significance, while contributing toward a sociology of loss. The presentation examines how Euro-American portrayals of “Eastern” death and mourning rites have been intricately linked to dubious ideas of race, civilization, gender, and sexuality. Concluding with a counter-narrative, it underscores the potential of compassion and witnessing in understanding death practices marginalized by race and religion.
Jyoti Puri is Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. She writes and teaches at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality studies, death studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. Her interests include sexuality, gender, race, nation, state, death, and religion.
Puri has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2022-2023 for her current project on death and migration. In 2021, she was honored by the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association. In 2019-2020, she was a Research Associate at the Women’s Studies Program in Religion at Harvard Divinity School. She previously received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship and a Fulbright Senior Research award.
Puri’s book, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India’s Present, was published by Duke University Press (2016). It received the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association in 2018. Her previous books include, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India (Routledge 1999) and Encountering Nationalism, (Blackwell Publishers 2004).
She co-edited a special issue on “Feminist Mournings” (with Kimberly Juanita Brown) for the journal, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. Puri has published numerous articles and book chapters and has co-edited a special issue on gender, sexuality, state, and nation for Gender & Society (April 2005) and another one on sexuality and the state for Rethinking Marxism (October 2012).
Puri served on the editorial collective for the interdisciplinary journal Foucault Studies, as deputy editor for the journal, Gender & Society, and is currently on the editorial board for the journal, SIGNS. She has served in various capacities at the American Sociological Association, including as Chair of the Section on Sex and Gender, and Sociologists for Women in Society.
For Puri, teaching is a constant source of stimulation. She started teaching many years ago, first as an international graduate student. At Simmons, she has taught required and elective sociology courses as well as a range of courses outside of the department geared toward graduate students and undergraduate students—Gender and Cultural Studies Program, honors program, general education requirement, international relations and women’s studies majors, among others.