Biography
Dr. Deepa Kumar is an award-winning scholar and activist. She is the recipient of the Dallas Smythe award for her engaged scholarship and the Georgina Smith award for her work on gender and race equity.
Her work is driven by an active engagement with the key forces that define our era–neoliberalism and imperialism. Her first book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike, is about the power of the U.S. working class in effectively challenging the priorities of neoliberalism. In her second book, she turns her attention to race and the politics of empire during the War on Terror era. Titled Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, the book examines how a racialized terrorist threat has been produced. She takes a long view, tracing the ways in which the “Muslim enemy” has historically been mobilized to suit the goals of empire.
She is currently working on a third book on the cultural politics of the US national security state from the Cold War to the War on Terror. In it, she pays heed to the ways in which gender, race, and class intersect in the reproduction of imperial structures.
Kumar is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University. She is affiliated faculty with Middle Eastern Studies and graduate faculty in the Sociology department.
She is a much sought after public speaker and has spoken at dozens of university and community forums on a range of topics: Islamophobia, Women, Empire and Islam, Imperialist Feminism, the War on Terror and other related topics. She has shared her expertise in numerous media outlets such as BBC, The New York Times, NPR, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Hurriyat Daily News (Turkey), Al Jazeera and other national and international news media outlets.