Jigna Desai is Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at UC -- Santa Barbara.  She is a promiscuous interdisciplinary and dis-disciplinary scholar with background in astronomy, cognitive science, literature, and media studies.  

Their current research expands to the fields of critical disability studies, feminist and queer science studies, and racial necropower through analyses of neural selfhood and neurocitizenship. Drawing on intersectional feminist, queer, and disability theories of biopolitics and citizenship, the research examines the changing meaning of what it is to be human as knowledge about the brain increasingly defines our understanding of the mind and self.

Her most established research theorizes diasporic feminism and queer diasporas of the Brown Atlantic.  Specifically, she offers the Brown Atlantic as an analytic for understanding how South Asians negotiate gender, sexual, and racial formations arising from colonialism, empire, and racial projects of the nation-state. Beyond Bollywood (Routledge 2004) was the first book to queer the South Asian diaspora and to demonstrate the centrality of cinema to the racial, gendered, and sexual formations of South Asian diasporas in North America and Britain. She has also co-edited several collections – The Bollywood Reader for McGraw Hill Press (2009), Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia for Routledge (2013), and Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South for University of Illinois Press (2013). She has published widely on issues of race, media, gender, and sexuality in journals such as Social Text, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Meridiens.

She has served as a board member of the Association for Asian American Studies and serves as a co-editor of the Asian American Experience book series for the Univ. of Illinois Press. For two decades, her teaching and service have worked to strengthen institutional support for undergraduate and graduate students of color. She is the co-founder with Dr. Kari Smalkoski of MN Youth Story Squad (a K-12 University partnership) and former PI for Minnesota Transform, a $5 million higher education initiative funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address decolonial and racial justice at the University of Minnesota, in the Twin Cities, and throughout the state through public humanities projects.

They are a dedicated mentor and adviser who has mentored with over 100 graduate students and junior faculty. For almost three decades, her scholarship, teaching, and service have worked to strengthen institutional support for racial justice, international students, LGBTQ students, students of color within higher education.

She is the current director of the Center for Feminist Futures.