Description

Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and in this capacity founded and now leads the largest undergraduate minor at UC Berkeley, a program in Global Poverty and Practice.



Roy holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004), The Practice of International Health (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Blackwell, 2011). Her authored book,Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (Routledge, 2010) is the recipient of the 2011 Paul Davidoff Book Award, which recognizes research that advances social justice.

Roy is a committed teacher in the fields of global urbanism and international development. In 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty. Also in 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Mentors award, a recognition bestowed by the Graduate Assembly of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2008, Roy was the recipient of the Golden Apple Teaching award, the only teaching award given by the student body. She was the 2009 California Professor of the Year by CASE/ Carnegie Foundation. Most recently, Roy received the 2011 Excellence in Achivement Award of the California Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement recognition.

Roy is currently involved in three collaborative projects of research and practice: Urban Revolutions in the Age of Global Urbanism (with Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner, Vinay Gidwani, Michael Goldman, Anant Maringanti, and Jo Santoso); The 21st Century Indian City: Setting New Agendas for Policy (with Raka Ray, Pranab Bardhan, and Ashok Bardhan); and Territories of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty Scholarship (with Emma Shaw Crane). All three projects are concerned with poverty and inequality as well as with the question of social change.