Dr. Vrushali Patil
Professor · Tenured
Department of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
She/Her/Hers/Herself
About
Dr. Vrushali Pail received her Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies in 2004 and her PhD in Sociology in 2006 from the University of Maryland College Park. She joined Florida International University as an Assistant Professor in 2007, receiving tenure in 2013. She joined the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2023 as Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies.She is the winner of the 2018 Distinguished Article Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sexualities Section for her article, “The Heterosexual Matrix as Imperial Effect.” Finally, she also currently serves as co-editor of the journal Sociological Theory.
Research interests
Dr. Patil is a historical sociologist and feminist theorist. Dr. Patil is interested in how interrelated histories of coloniality, empire, race, nation, gender and sexuality matter for feminist and sociological scholarship. Her latest book, Webbed Connectivities: The Imperial Sociology of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality (2022, Univ of Minnesota Press), explores the difference interrelated histories of coloniality, empire and race make for theorizing sex, gender, and sexuality. Dr. Patil has also published widely on such themes in a number of journals including Signs, Gender & Society, Journal of Historical Sociology, Sex Roles, Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Geographies, Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among others. Additionally, she is currently co-editing the volume Anticolonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Sociologies. Finally, her next research project is broadly concerned with framing the study of emotions within the larger power structures described above.Teaching interests
Dr. Patil teaches courses on race, gender, sexuality, empire and theory. At UMBC, she teaches the undergraduate/graduate cross-listed course, Feminist Theory. She has also introduced a new undergraduate course, based on her research, called Imperial Entanglements: Race, Gender, Sexuality. She intends to cross-list this course with a graduate section in the future. In the future, she plans to teach a course on power, inequality, and emotion. This course will be developed along with her new research project on the same topicEducation
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Ph D, Sociology
— University of Maryland, College Park (2006) Politics of Space, Identity and International Community: Negotiating Decolonization in the United Nations
- Graduate Certificate, Women's Studies — University of Maryland, College Park (2004)
- BA, Sociology — University of Alabama, Huntsville (1997)