Dr. Amrute received her B.A. in Art History from Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago
Her scholarship focuses on contemporary capitalism and ways of working. She is particularly interested in how race and class are revisited and remade in sites of new economy work, such as coding and software economies. Her work investigates how post-genomic racial imaginaries inform popular conceptions of person, population, and proclivity. Amrute's book, Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT workers in Berlin was published by Duke University Press in Autumn 2016. This book tells the story of short-term coders from India who sought work in Germany under a temporary visa program called the German Green Card. Amrute investigates how their middle class aspirations both are made possible by and are stymied by the regimes of racialized labor that greet them as temporary programmers.
Encoding Race Encoding class won the Diana Forsythe Prize for best book in the anthropology of work, technology, or science (including medicine) in 2017 and the International Convention for Asian Studies Best Book Award in 2019.
Research/Teaching Areas: Class and Capitalism, Tech Industry, Race and Labor, Race and Ethnicity, Science and Technology, Sociocultural Anthropology, South Asian History
Current Projects/Research: The politics of rumor and rage in India and the United States; transnationalism’s and women's rights in India and the U.S. in the early 20th century; and ethics practices among technologists.
