Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="35:3-35:805;772-1574">Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Associate Professor of Anthropology and holds the Presidential Chair of Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also affiliated faculty in Asian American Studies, Religious Studies, and Global Studies. She is an Associate Editor of the journal <em><strong>Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory</strong></em>. She received her Ph.D. (2013) and M.A. (2007) in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her B.A. with Honors in Anthropology and Gender Studies from Northwestern University (2004). She joined UC Irvine in 2019 with a joint appointment in the Sikh Studies chair, and is building an interdisciplinary program in critical Sikh and transnational Panjab studies grounded in ethnographic and anthropological approaches.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="37:3-37:914;1579-2490">Her first book, <strong><em>Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda</em></strong> (Duke University Press, 2025; co-published with Sanctum Books, New Delhi, and Zand Press, Nairobi), reframes the 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda not as a single historical episode but as a continuous global critical event, tracing the afterlives of Asian racial expulsion and the entanglements of African and Asian communities across Uganda, India, and the diaspora. The book intervenes in the anthropology of citizenship and argues for an anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements that decenters North American frameworks in favor of sustained analysis of imperialism, race, citizenship, and decolonization. It draws in part on her fieldwork tracing the experiences of East African Sikh and Panjabi communities through African decolonization, neoliberal transformation, and shifting geopolitical arrangements.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="39:3-39:1125;2495-3617">A substantial strand of her scholarship addresses the Sikh tradition, Sikh feminism, and the Sikh diaspora directly. "Sikhs in/of Africa: Imperial, Postcolonial, Transnational Articulations" appears in <strong><em>The Sikh World</em> </strong>(Routledge, 2023), edited by Pashaura Singh and Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair. "Sikhism, Gender and Feminism: Toward Critical Sikh Feminisms and Sikh Feminist Anthropology" appears in <strong><em>Sikhism: The Basics</em></strong> (Bloomsbury). She co-edited, with Rishi Guné, a <strong><em>Sikh Formations</em></strong> special forum introduced by "Locating Nikki Haley in Transnational Sikh and South Asian American Discourse" (2025), and is co-editing, with Balbinder Singh Bhogal, a forum on Sanam Sutirath Wazir's <strong><em>The Kaurs of 1984</em></strong>. Her earlier essays in <strong><em>Sikh Formations</em></strong> include "Sikh Diasporic Feminisms: Provocation 1" (2018) and "After Wisconsin: Registers of Sikh Precarity in the Alien-Nation" (2012), the latter written in the aftermath of the Oak Creek gurdwara shooting. Her essay "Majoritizing the Minority: The Sikh and Panjabi Ethos Today" appears in the <strong><em>Borderlines</em></strong> (CSSAAME) series on majority/minority politics in South Asia (2026).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="41:3-41:906;3622-4525">Her second book in progress, <em><strong>Sikh Study, Black Study: Feminist Anthropologies of Relationality</strong> <strong>in Planetary Times</strong></em>, connects Panjabi Sikh migration and settlement to broader questions of global Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and Black Atlantic connections, bringing Pan-Africanist, Afro-Asian, critical race, anti-caste, and feminist frameworks into conversation with the anthropology of Sikhism. Across her work she draws on feminist theory and feminist anthropological method, and she writes on the politics of knowledge production and the university as an institution — a critical university studies approach that examines the relationships among universities, communities, and the publics they share. Additional peer-reviewed work has appeared in <strong><em>Critical Times</em></strong>, <strong><em>Public Culture</em></strong>, <strong><em>Feminist Review</em></strong>, <em>C<strong>omparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East</strong></em>, and <strong><em>Critical Ethnic Studies</em></strong>.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="43:3-43:810;4530-5337">Hundle was born and raised in the Chicago area by parents who migrated from Panjab, India, in the late 1960s and 1970s, and her early engagement with the Sikh and Panjabi diaspora spanned the United Kingdom, Canada, and Panjab. Before UC Irvine, she was a Research Associate teaching in the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Ph.D. program at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda (2013–2015); Assistant Professor of Anthropology and affiliated faculty with the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program at UC Merced (2015–2018); and a Visiting Professor at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley (2018). Her writing has also appeared in the popular press, including <em><strong>Scroll.in</strong></em>, <em><strong>Zócalo Public Square</strong></em>, <em><strong>Al Jazeera</strong></em>, and the <strong><em>Los Angeles Review of Books</em></strong>.</p>

Race, religion, and minoritization; violence, citizenship, and decolonization. The anthropology of the Sikh tradition and critical Sikh studies, including ethnographic approaches to Sikh pasts, presents, and futures. The Sikh and Panjabi diaspora, with particular focus on East African Sikh and Panjabi communities and Afro–South Asian entanglements. Feminist anthropology, gender and sexuality, and the development of Sikh feminist praxis. Afro-Asian entanglements, imperialism, and the Indian Ocean and Black Atlantic worlds. Critical university studies and the politics of knowledge production. Regions of study include Uganda, East Africa, South Asia, and transnational Panjab.