We're delighted to announce that Dr Perveez Mody will be taking up a new position of University Lecturer in September 2017.
Dr Mody was awarded her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2001, and is the author of The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi (Routledge, 2008), which provided the first ethnographic account of love-marriage in contemporary urban India. She has been conducting fieldwork among Delhi’s love-marriage couples from the late 1990s to the present day, and continues to research the politics of intercommunity marriage in India, including debates about “Love-Jihad” and reactions to it in the shape of “Love Commandos”. Her work addresses phenomena such as elopements and (self-) abductions to address questions of gender, agency and sexuality in the context of anthropological theories of marriage and kinship. Her writings address debates in the anthropology of kinship, love, reciprocity and intimacy, and she has done archival research on Henry Maine and his role as Law Member in the enactment of civil marriage legislation in colonial India. She has also written on love jurisdiction and “forced marriage” (in a volume co-edited by her, entitled Marriage: Rites and Rights); and she has conducted research on marriages of convenience (“MoC’s”) amongst gay and lesbian South Asians.
Dr Mody is currently writing a monograph about the phenomenon known as “forced marriage” in the UK, exploring conceptions of coercion in the context of kinship obligation and care. From 2019 she hopes to begin new research in the UK, on processes of marital separation and divorce. She has teaching expertise in the anthropology of kinship, gender and care, the history of anthropological theory, the anthropology of South Asia, and urban anthropology, and has strong interests in visual anthropology and ethnographic film.
Dr. Mody was previously employed as a Lecturer in the Division of Social Anthropology from 2008-2009; as Mellon Fellow in Sociology and Social Anthropology in 2010-2011, and Lecturer in Social Anthropology from 2012-2016. She is also a Fellow and the Senior Tutor of King's College, Cambridge.