Position Title
Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Chair of Cultural Studies Graduate Group
Rana M. Jaleel is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. She holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University, a JD from the Yale Law School, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. From 2013-2015, Dr. Jaleel was the Center for Reproductive Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School.
Dr. Jaleel’s work examines the politics of evidence: how concepts like reproductive labor, sex/gender, race, property, and sexuality are sustained or transformed through the recognition, narration, and redress of harm. Her first book, The Work of Rape (Duke University Press, 2021), received the Author of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press. The Work of Rape explores how the1990s’ redefinition of sexual violence in international law—the prosecution of sexual violence as a war crime, crime against humanity, and genocide—owes a disturbing and unacknowledged debt to power and knowledge achieved from racial, imperial, and settler colonial domination. With AJ Bauer, Cristina Beltrán, and Andrew Ross, Dr. Jaleel is the co-editor of the Social Text: Periscope dossier“Is This What Democracy Looks Like?” She is co-editor, with Genevieve Clutario, of the Amerasia Journal special issue, “Rethinking Gendered Citizenship: Intimacy, Sovereignty, and Empire.” She is currently co-editing with Evren Savci the forthcoming South Atlantic Quarterly issue, “Queer/Trans of Color Transits and the Global Imaginaries of Racial Capitalism.” Other academic work has been published in places like The Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Cultural Studies, and The Brooklyn Law Review.
At UC Davis, Dr. Jaleel is a 2021-2024 College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellow. She is the Chair of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, Chair of the Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research, Faculty Advisor for the Sexuality Studies Minor, and the co-director of HATCH: The Feminist Arts & Sciences Initiative, funded by the Mellon Research Initiative. For HATCH, Dr. Jaleel runs the Write the Future! Lab, an undergraduate mixed genre writing workshop modeled on the creative intelligences, traditions, and activisms of women/queer/trans of color and transnational feminisms.
Dr. Jaleel is a board member for The Critical Ethnic Studies Journal and a part of its Editorial Collective. A longtime member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently serves on Committee A, the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.