Date: March 26, 2010, 4:00 pm
Location: Shambaugh Auditorium

Ananya Roy is Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning where she teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and international development. She also serves as Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and as co-Director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center.

In 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty. Also in 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Mentors award, a recognition bestowed by the Graduate Assembly of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2008, Roy was the recipient of the Golden Apple Teaching award, the only teaching award given by the student body. Most recently, Roy was named 2009 California Professor of the Year by CASE/ Carnegie Foundation.

Roy holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004) and co-editor of The Practice of International Health (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her new book is titled Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Frontiers of Millennial Development (Routledge, March 2010). She is currently completing a co-edited book (with Aihwa Ong) titled Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Roy is a member of SAVE the University, a faculty group formed at UC Berkeley in response to the budget cuts and fee hikes, and of Solidarity Alliance, a collaboration between the faculty, student, and worker movements at UC Berkeley.