Dr. Sushmita Chatterjee is Professor and Chair in the Department of Race, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at CSU. She is trained as a feminist and queer political theorist with a dual degree PhD from Penn State in Women’s Studies and Political Science (political theory). Her work engages the parameters of Postcolonial Studies, Transnational Feminist and Queer Theory, and Animal Studies. Her work in Animal Studies has led her towards Plant Studies and Climate Justice. Dr. Chatterjee has written, as well as taught courses, on environmental justice, global and transnational feminisms, queer and feminist theory, and forms of corporal governance intrinsic to gender, race, sexuality, nationality, and transnational flows.

“Meat! A Transnational Analysis” (Duke University Press 2021), which she co-edited with Banu Subramaniam, works to decipher what becomes “meat.” Looking at meat as an assemblage of meanings gathered across food studies, feminist and queer studies, and animal studies, this collection of essays pries open the category of “meat” as a power-saturated locus of analyses.

Her 2024 solo-authored book “Postcolonial Hauntings: Play and Transnational Feminism (University of Illinois Press), centers meaning-play as a persistent haunting in postcolonial theory, and draws attention to exclusions, errors, and omissions in feminist and queer theory. The book asks: How may queer postcolonial subjects use animality as sabotage? How do we move beyond imperial modes of hospitality, and friend-making? If translations are a necessity in feminist and queer transnational movements, how may we understand the translator’s play with meaning? These questions enliven Postcolonial Hauntings and delineate its significance in terms of bringing to the forefront key conversations in transnational feminist and queer theory, and un-doing its stakes.

Dr. Chatterjee is working on her next book project that analyses the slippage of classifications through climate change. This project uses postcolonial studies and transnational feminist and queer analyses to study how categories do and un-do varied politics through climate change.