Inderpal Grewal

Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Inderpal Grewal, M.A. Punjab University, Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley, faculty member at Yale since 2009: You are a preeminent, exemplary scholar of movement. In your field-defining scholarship, you have shown how ideas, politics, power, knowledge, and artifacts of popular culture travel and transform across borders, genders, and social inequalities. Along the way, you invigorated the interdisciplinary fields of American Studies, South Asian Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, encouraging us to think much more carefully and creatively about the transnational, the postcolonial, and the cultural ramifications of imperialism and empire. Your extraordinary work on security regimes, feminism, state power, nongovernmental organizations, and neoliberal retrenchment has energized generations of scholars in cultural studies and beyond. And you accomplished all this with your signature good humor, your inviting laugh, and your refreshing skepticism toward institutional operations.

In a fast decade, you built the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale into a tour-de-force of research, teaching, and programing, in turn reshaping the intellectual life of the Yale community. The WGSS Program has not simply survived but has soared because of you, and has become a model for our Ivy League colleagues. By never taking “no” for an answer in a time of budgetary constraints, you oversaw the hiring of the many WGSS faculty who are now the backbone of our robust program. WGSS course offerings, course enrollments, and undergraduate majors exploded in number thanks to you and your leadership. The speaker series, symposia, workshops, and interdisciplinary gatherings you convened were prescient, politically urgent, and profoundly appreciated by students, staff, and faculty across the university. Indeed, what you accomplished for WGSS at Yale mirrors what you accomplished for women’s, gender and sexuality studies as an intellectual formation more broadly: expanding its horizons, transnationalizing its purview, keeping it real, relevant, and necessary for our challenging time.

You are an exemplary advisor and teacher. Your undergraduate and graduate students are grateful for your attentive mentorship and for your outstanding commitment to their education, their research, and their futures. You are demanding in the best way, counselling your advisees to read, research, and think more expansively, across fields of knowledge. You show your students how to explore “a messier world” (your resonant phrase) with intellectual rigor and luminous prose. Much of your teaching was collaborative, as you generously shared your authority with your graduate students and colleagues. You created community in every possible way.

In addition to all that we will miss about your intellect, your leadership, your mentorship and your friendship, we will also miss your inspiring, impeccable sartorial style, reminding us that nerds can look good too. And your colleagues and students will deeply miss your living room, which served as the social hub of WGSS and several other communities at Yale. Your celebrations and dinners—often generously co-hosted by Alfred and your daughters—were necessary breaks from the grind, evenings of joy that were especially assuring for newcomers.

We suspect you might be a Californian at heart, but we hope you will return to New Haven often. To learn and laugh with you is an unparalleled privilege.