Research Bio
Dr. Paola Bacchetta is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. She is a critical theorist whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, colonialism, race, religion, capitalism, Empire, and other relations of power, along with local, translocal to transnational feminist and queer activism. She also works on right-wing movements, gender and sexuality. Her areas of specialization are India, France, the U.S., Brazil and Italy.
She is the author or contributing co-editor of the following book length works: Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances (Durham: Duke University Press, 2026); Fatema Mernissi for Our Times (with Minoo Moallem, Syracuse University Press, 2025); Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, with Sunaina Maira and Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2019); Femminismi Queer Postcoloniali (with Laura Fantone. Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2015); Gender in the Hindu Nation (Delhi, India: Women Ink, 2004); Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (with Margaret Power. New York: Routledge, 2002); Textes du Mouvement Lesbien en France, 1970-2000 (with Claudie Lesselier, DVD, 2011).
Dr. Bacchetta has published over 90 professional journal articles and book chapters on her research, in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese and Danish. She lectures widely within the U.S., Europe, North Africa, Latin America and South Asia.
Professor Bacchetta was the first Chair of the Gender Consortium at Berkeley, which represents all research centers and teaching units on gender across the university. She also served as Co-Chair of the Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and Peoples’ Rights. She serves on the Advisory Boards, and is affiliated faculty within, the following research centers at University of California, Berkeley: Center for Race and Gender, and Center for Right-Wing Studies. She is Affiliated Professor in the following Berkeley research institutes and centers: Institute for South Asia Studies; Institute for European Studies; Center for Middle East Studies; Center for African Studies; Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures. She was a Steering Committee Member, and then an Executive Committee member, of the California-wide Center for New Racial Studies. She was the Director of the Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG), Berkeley’s research center on gender, sexuality and its intersections with other relations of power, and led its renaming and re-organization as the Institute for Gender and Sexuality Research (IGSR). Professor Bacchetta is also a former Advisory Board member of Berkeley's Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures. She is an Affiliated Faculty member of the Graduate Group in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Transnationally she is co-director of Decolonizing Sexualities Network.
Research Expertise and Interest
transnational feminist and queer theory, decolonial feminist and queer theory, activisms / artivisms / practices / movements /alliances / right-wings, geographic specializations: U.S.; France; India; Italy; Brazil