Paola Bacchetta

Paola Bacchetta is Professor and the Chair of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She is a critical theorist whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, colonialism, race, religion, capitalism, Empire, and other relations of power, along with local, translocal to transnational feminist and queer activism. She also works on right-wing movements, gender and sexuality. Her areas of specialization are India, France, the U.S., Brazil and Italy.

Dr. Bacchetta is the author or contributing co-editor of the following book length works: Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances (Durham: Duke University Press, 2026); Fatema Mernissi for Our Times (with Minoo Moallem, Syracuse University Press, 2025); Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, (with Sunaina Maira and Howard Winant, New York: Routledge, 2019); Femminismi Queer Postcoloniali (with Laura Fantone. Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2015); Gender in the Hindu Nation (Delhi, India: Women Ink, 2004); Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (with Margaret Power. New York: Routledge; , 2002); Textes du Mouvement Lesbien en France, 1970-2000 (with Claudie Lesselier, DVD, 2011).

Dr. Bacchetta has published over 90 professional journal articles and book chapters on her research, in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese and Danish. She has lectured widely within the U.S., and in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North Africa, Turkey, Brazil and South Asia.

Dr. Bacchetta is the recipient of many awards and and grants including Fulbright, Mellon, multiple different kinds of European Union grants, Peder Sather Research Fund, and the France-Berkeley Fund. She has been a postdoctoral scholar in the USA at Harvard University and the Five College Women's Studies Research Center, in France at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Université de Paris 3, and in Brazil at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Florianópolis) and Universidade Federal de Bahia (Salvador, Bahia).

Professor Bacchetta was the first Chair of the Gender Consortium at Berkeley, which represents all research centers and teaching units on gender across the university. She also served as Co-Chair of the Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and Peoples’ Rights. She was the Director of the Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG), University of California, Berkeley’s research center on gender, sexuality and its intersections with other relations of power, and oversaw its transition, re-organization and re-naming as Institute for Gender and Sexuality Research, which she also directed. She was a Steering Committee Member, and then an Executive Committee member, of the California-wide Center for New Racial Studies. She serves on the Advisory Boards, and is affiliated faculty within, the following research centers at University of California, Berkeley: Center for Race and Gender, and Center for Right-Wing Studies. She is Affiliated Professor in the following Berkeley research institutes and centers: Institute for South Asia Studies; Institute for European Studies; Center for African Studies; Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures. Professor Bacchetta is a former Advisory Board member of Berkeley's Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, and co-founder of Berkeley's Queer of Color Reading Group. She is an Affiliated Faculty member of the Graduate Group in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Transnationally she is Co-Director of Decolonizing Sexualities Network.