Atreyee Sen

Atreyee Sen is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Social Sciences, a position she assumed on 1 February 2025 after serving as Associate Professor since 2015. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from SOAS, University of London (2003), and previously held academic roles at the University of Sussex and the University of Manchester.

• BA in Sociology, University of Calcutta (1994)
• MA in Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University (1996)
• PhD in Social Anthropology, SOAS, University of London (2003)

Her research centers on urban South Asia, particularly India, with a focus on gender, violence, political mobilization, and subaltern communities. She investigates how marginalized groups—such as women in Mumbai slums, Muslim youth in Hyderabad, and former Maoist guerrillas in Calcutta—navigate and resist structural violence through political activism and cultural production. Her ethnographic work explores themes of prisons, moral policing, custodial disappearances, and urban poverty, challenging reductive narratives about the 'poor' and 'violent' in non-Western contexts.

The recent articles in her publication record reveal a sustained engagement with political violence, urban precarity, and resistance. Her work spans ethnographic studies of child vigilantes, anti-Romeo squads, and informal economies in Indian cities, often highlighting the intersection of gender, state power, and everyday survival. She employs comparative frameworks, such as between Chicago and Mumbai, to broaden anthropological theory. Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from political science, sociology, and gender studies.

• Sutasoma Award for Outstanding Research Towards a PhD (2002)
• NirmalChunder Basu Ray Memorial Award, University of Calcutta (1994)

Atreyee Sen has been actively involved in public scholarship through media engagements, including interviews and documentaries with BBC Radio 4 on topics such as the Delhi rape case, women vigilantes, and Indian elections. She has also led major research projects, including an ERC Advanced Grant on global political anger and a project on cashless economies and urban debt. She is currently writing a monograph titled ‘Morgue tags and body bags’ -- Ethno-histories, custodial death/disappearances and state torture in urban India. She has served in leadership roles in international academic bodies, including the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) and the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA). While no formal lab or team is specified, her collaborative research outputs and network suggest active engagement with global academic communities. She has not indicated any future work beyond her current monograph and ongoing projects.