Ananya Roy

Ananya Roy is a scholar of international development and global urbanism. Born in Calcutta, India (1970), Roy is Professor and Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She has been a professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Comparative Urban Studies (1992) degree from Mills College, and Master of City Planning (1994) and Doctor of Philosophy (1999) degrees from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

Roy does work in three areas:

Roy engages with feminist and ethnographic methodologies and often draws upon post-colonial feminism for theoretical inspiration.

In the field of urban studies, Roy is well known for advancing the theoretical concept of “urban informality” and the call for “new geographies of theory” that are attentive to the urban condition of the global South She argues for a transnational approach to urbanism and urban planning, and more recently, for a transnational approach to politics and ethics

In 2015 Roy was named Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare and Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She had been Professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California at Berkeley, and, prior to that, held the Friesen Chair in Urban Studies and was a founder of the Urban Studies major at UC Berkeley. She also served as Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies, where she was the founding chair of the undergraduate minor in Global Poverty and Practice at UC Berkeley. She served as co-director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center from 2009 to 2012, and she served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies from 2005 to 2009.

At Berkeley, Roy taught graduate and undergraduate students. Her undergraduate course, "Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium," drew 700 students each Fall at UC Berkeley. In 2006, she 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 Achievement Award of the California Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement recognition.

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