is currently Director and Professor of Women Studies at University of California-Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. A founder of Narika, an agency that addresses the needs of South Asian women in the U.S., she works with activist groups that focus on Asian women and immigration issues. She has authored a monograph and co-edited several books and journal issues, often with her long time collaborator Caren Kaplan. Her special interests include the history of British imperialism, non-western women travelers, consumer culture and globalization, South Asian women in diaspora, and the new transnational feminist activism