Sharmila Rudrappa

Sharmila Rudrappa is Professor of Sociology and Director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches and researches on gender, race, labor, and reproductive justice, with a focus on the U.S. and India. Rudrappa’s current research looks at how markets develop in human materials, specifically from women's bodies. She has written extensively on the cultural politics of assisted reproductive technologies in India. Rudrappa is the author of Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India (2015) and Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship (2004), and has articles in such journals as Positions: Asia Critique and Gender & Society. She has a forthcoming article, "Reproducing Dystopia: The Politics of Transnational Surrogacy in India, 2002–2015,” in Critical Sociology (2018). She holds a BSc in Horticulture from the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore, India, an MS in Conservative Biology and Sustainable Development, and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.