Smitha Radhakrishnan

Smitha Radhakrishnan serves as the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. A feminist qualitative sociologist, her research examines finance, development, and globalization across India, the U.S., and South Africa through the lens of racial, caste, class, and gender inequality.

Her academic foundation includes a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Radhakrishnan specializes in ethnographic and interview-based methodologies to investigate how colonialism, slavery, and the Cold War shape contemporary inequalities. Her work situates individual experiences within global systems while advocating for structural change benefiting the global majority. Key research domains include microfinance exploitation, neoliberal gender dynamics, and decolonizing sociological frameworks.

Her publications reveal a trajectory from transnational IT worker studies to critical analyses of debt and financialization in the Global South, consistently centering marginalized perspectives and advocating for epistemological shifts in sociology.

Scientific recognition includes:

• 2023 Honorable Mention from the ASA Sex and Gender Section
• 2024 Alice Amsden Distinguished Book Honorable Mention
• 2024 Immanuel Wallerstein Award from the ASA’s Political Economy of World Systems Section

Radhakrishnan mentors undergraduate researchers through Wellesley's Ann Maurer ‘51 Public Speaking Program, which she directs, and leads externally funded projects including a multi-sited household debt study in India and South Africa. She advocates for anti-racist educational transformation through campus committees and has developed three edX MOOCs reaching global audiences.

She collaborates with researchers in Uttarakhand and Durban for her current debt study while maintaining NATyA Dance Collective, which promotes Indian classical dance forms in the Boston area.