Laavanya Kathiravelu

Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore and at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the  University of Oslo

Laavanya Kathiravelu’s research is at the intersections of international migration, race and ethnic studies and contemporary urban diversity, particularly in Asia and the Persian Gulf. Her first book was Migrant Dubai (Palgrave, 2016), which explored experiences of low wage migrant workers in the UAE. She has also published widely on issues of race, inequality and migration in Singapore. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (2011-2014) and a Fung Fellow at Princeton University between 2015-16. In 2019, she was recipient of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Fellowship (SSHRF) and recognised as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons (TOYP) in the area of academic leadership. In 2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the City University of New York (CUNY). In 2023, her writing won the John Lent Best Article award at the MSB section of the Asian Studies Association. She comments regularly on public forums and through op-eds on issues of migration, race and diversity.