Assistant Professor

Jinee Lokaneeta received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2006. Prior to USC, she taught Political Science at Kirori Mal College, Delhi University, India. Jinee completed her Bachelors, Masters and Mphil in Political Science at Delhi University. Her areas of interest include Law and Violence, Public Law, Political Theory (Postcolonial, Feminist and Marxist theory), Jurisprudence, and Cultural Studies.

Research Interests

Jinee’s research focuses on Debates on Law, Violence, and State Power. Drawing from Political and Legal Theory, Public Law and interdisciplinary literature on violence, she explores how the jurisprudence of interrogations in contemporary democracies deals with the infliction of pain and suffering by state officials. Her work points to the centrality of excess violence in democratic governance by demonstrating that even before recent debates on the use of torture in the ‘war on terror’,the laws of interrogation were ambivalent about the infliction of pain.

Some of her current projects include: The theoretical implications of the Indian criminal justice system’s use of narco analysis and brain scan technology for state and law’s relationship to excess violence; the relationship of Indian civil liberty groups with the law especially the tension between utilizing law as a site of intervention even while being skeptical about its potential; Broader questions of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in legal studies especially the interface between political science and interdisciplinary legal studies in the United States.

Selected Publications

  • Transnational Torture: Law, State, and Violence in the United Statesand India , under contract with NYU Press.
  • “Torture Debates in the post-9/11 United States : Law, Violence and Governmentality,” Theory and Event, Forthcoming.
  • “A Rose by another Name: Definitions, Sanitized Terms and Imagery of Torture in 24,” Law, Culture and Humanities (forthcoming).
  • “Torture in Postcolonial India : Struggle within the Jurisprudence” inW. Zeydanlioglu and J. Parry (eds) Rights, Citizenship & Torture: Perspectives on Evil, Law and the State (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2009).