Sahana Ghosh is a social anthropologist who conducts research in India and Bangladesh. Using ethnographic, feminist, and historical research methods, she focuses on the lived experiences and contested histories of mobility, borders, and security regimes. Her work draws attention to the forms of violence, inequality, and values that underlie transnational kinship, migration, citizenship, illicit economies, the postcolonial state, and militarization.

Ghosh’s first book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023 / Yoda Press, 2024), chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and everyday practices of migration and border security regimes. It received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Critical Ethnography Book Prize from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Ghosh has edited interdisciplinary special issues in Social Text, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Critical Military Studies, and has published in leading anthropology, South Asian studies, gender studies, and cultural studies journals, as well as on more public-facing platforms.

At SCAS, Ghosh will work on her second book, on the gendered labors of soldiering in postcolonial India. Based on ethnographic and historical research, the book investigates what makes soldiering – as a form of mobile work – both promising and perilous for individuals, families, and state institutions, and how they in turn make it meaningful and valuable.

Sahana Ghosh is in residence in the autumn of 2025.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.