My name is Anneeth Kaur Hundle and I am an Assistant 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 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 family and 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 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 now first book reorient the 1972 Asian expulsion as a global critical event, tracing the afterlives of racial expulsion and Afro-Asian entanglements in contemporary (transnational and transregional Uganda). I ethnographically examine the post-expulsion racial non-citizen incorporation of Ugandan Asian returnees and new migrants via an analysis of the transforming nature of empire, specters and imaginaries of Indian subimperialism/settler colonialism, Afro-Asian solidarities and nation-state building. More broadly, my work argues for the importance of Afro-Asian study and an anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements that decenters typical North American focuses. A secondary interest traces East African Sikh/Punjabi community experiences during this period of decolonization and neoliberal transformation in East Africa, connecting Punjabi/Sikh migration and settlement to broader debates on global Africa and the Indian Ocean world. 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 focus on the politics of knowledge production itself, with attention to the university as constituitive of normative notions of society, community, nation, citizenship and processes of racial, religious and gendered 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 institutions, as well as the possibilities of feminist leadership in academic and community networks.

At UCI, I am building a global and interdisciplinary framework for an emergent Sikh 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. UCI is a premier site for innovative ethnographic and critical anthropological approaches to the study of Sikh pasts, presents and futures.We have begun this work through forming an interdisciplinary collective around the theme of Sikh feminisms, with attention to intersectional, postcolonial and transnational approaches to the field. 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 on the intersections of anthropology and Sikh Studies.

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