My name is Anneeth Kaur Hundle and I am Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine. In January 2019, I joined the faculty with an additional appointment as a Chair in Sikh Studies, currently the Presidential Chair of Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies. I am affiliated faculty with the Religious Studies Program, Global Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at UCI.
I was born and brought up in the Chicago area by my parents, who migrated from the Punjab, India to the US in the late 1960s and 70s. I spent my childhood traversing sites of Punjabi Sikh settlement, including the UK, Canada and the Punjab. My lifelong engagement with East Africa emerged later in my college years, when I became more interested in tracing diasporic community connections to the African Continent and merging my interests in Black and African Studies to those of the South Asian/Punjabi/Sikh diaspora. I completed my B.A. in anthropology and gender studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. At NU, I worked as an editor of a feminist magazine and was engaged in anti-war activism in the aftermath of 9/11. I also volunteered with Apna Ghar, a South Asian women-oriented battered women’s shelter, and wrote my senior thesis on Ugandan Asian returnee Ugandan Asian/South Asian migrant women’s experiences of DV and feminist activism in Uganda. I was engaged in Sikh community issues and political activism throughout this period, and became intellectually involved in the field of Sikh Studies as a graduate student University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
I completed my Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2013. My PhD research and first book, Insecurities of Expulsion, reorient the 1972 Asian expulsion as a global critical event, tracing the afterlives of Asian racial expulsion and Afro-Asian entanglements in transcontinental Uganda. In addition to its interventions in the anthropology of citizenship, my work argues for the importance of global Afro-Asian study and an anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements that decenters typical North American focuses in favor of ongoing analyses of imperialism, race, citizenship and decolonization.
A key interest of mine is tracing East African Sikh/Punjabi community experiences during this period of African decolonization, neoliberal transformation and changing geopolitical arrangements, connecting Punjabi Sikh migration and settlement to broader debates on global Africa and the Indian Ocean and Black Atlantic world, a theme I take up more pointedly in my second book in progress, Sikh Study, Black Study.
Post-PhD, I returned to Uganda as a Research Associate teaching in the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Ph.D. Program at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda from 2013-2015. I was then Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Associated Faculty with the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program at UC Merced (2015-2018), and a Visiting Professor at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley in 2018.
A recurring thematic in my research and scholarly program is a grounding in feminist theory and feminist anthropological approaches, as well as a focus on the politics of knowledge production itself. I attend to the university-institution as constitutive of normative notions of society, community, nation, citizenship and processes of racial, religious, gendered and sexual minoritization. To that end, I weave critical university studies approaches in my courses, research and academic writing, working through the relationships between universities, communities, and the shared publics with which both engage. I am interested in contemporary concerns surrounding the decolonization of knowledge and university institutions, as well as the possibilities of feminist leadership and Sikh feminist praxis in academic and community networks.
At UCI, I am building a global and interdisciplinary framework for a critical Sikh and transnational Punjab Studies that encompasses the diversity of Sikh identities, subjectivities, migration and settlement experiences and that examines Sikhism and Sikh communities in lived, situated context. I bring new Left, Pan-Africanist, Afro-Asian, critical race, religion, anti-caste and feminist (gender/sexuality) sensibilities to such possibilities. In addition, I am working through the anthropology of/and Sikhism. UCI is a premier site for innovative ethnographic and critical anthropological approaches to the study of Sikh pasts, presents and futures.New undergraduate courses and research are underway, and anthropology graduate students are conducting cutting-edge research in the field. See Sikh Studies at UCI for more information.
I am currently Associate Editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory.
Education:
2004 B.A. with Honors, Anthropology and Gender Studies, Northwestern University
2007 M.A., Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
2013 Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor