Laavanya Kathiravelu

Biography

Laavanya Kathiravelu is Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Her research sits 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 interrogated the experiences of low wage migrant workers in the emirate of Dubai. She has also published widely on issues of race, inequality and migration in Singapore. Prior to joining NTU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She was also 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. Laavanya is a board member of the migrant welfare organisation, HOME and comments regularly on public forums and through op-eds on issues of migration, race and diversity in Singapore. In 2022, she is a Fulbright Scholar based at the City University of New York (CUNY).