Susan Dewey

Susan Dewey's broad research interests lie in how changes in macro-economic policies and social instability at the state level impact individuals, particularly women. She received her PhD in Anthropology in 2004 after eighteen months of Fulbright-Hays funded dissertation research on the impact of the International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment policies on constructions of gender, class and identity among high-income groups in media-related professions in Bombay , India . Her doctoral research resulted in the publication of two forthcoming books, Making Miss India Miss Universe: Constructing Gender, Power and the Nation in Post-Structural Adjustment India and Becoming Cosmopolitan: Constructing Gender and Power in Hindi Cinema. Her research has also been appeared in article format in Journal of Ethnography and Education Quarterly, Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, Labrys and Manushi. She has served as an Assistant Editor and contributing writer for the past four years to the Bombay-based women's magazine Gurlz, for which she writes “Susan Says,” a monthly column which deals with what she terms “real world feminism” and its implications for women cross-culturally.

Dr. Dewey served as Consultant on Gender and Counter-Trafficking to the United Nations in Yerevan Armenia before coming to DePauw to teach courses in Anthropology, Conflict Studies and Women's Studies. Her current book project, tentatively titled Donor Regimes and the Prostitution of the Nation: The Feminist Politics of Sex Trafficking and Foreign Aid focuses on how victims of sex trafficking have not only become invisible symbols of life in a post-Soviet power vacuum (and metaphors of the market mechanism gone horribly awry), but how they have been manipulated by the broader political agendas of donor governments. Her plans for future research include collaborative work with her husband, a historian at DePauw, on conceptions of national identity and political autonomy among Indo-Fijians and Fijians in the wake of three coups in Fiji.