Jinee Lokaneeta is Associate Dean of Curriculum (with additional focus on diversity, equity and inclusion) and Professor in Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, Madison, NJ. She can be contacted at jlokanee@drew.edu
Jinee received her PhD from the University of Southern California (USC). 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, Critical Political and Legal Theory, Human Rights, Law in South Asia, & Interdisciplinary Legal Studies. She joined Drew University in 2006. She is also affiliated with the Womens and Gender Studies Program at Drew. She is the former President of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs. She is currently on the Editorial Board of the Law and Social Inquiry, and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review and previously on the Editorial Board of American Political Science Review; and Politics and Gender.
Her most recent work focuses on the Temporalities of Justice for Custodial Violence particularly focusing on the role of magistrates in India in ensuring legal safeguards. She recently co-led a Project and co-authored a Report (with Zeba Sikora of Project 39A) on Magistrates and Constitutional Safeguards: An Ethnographic Study of first production and remand in Delhi courts (2024).
Her most recent book The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India (University of Michigan Press, March 2020, Orient Blackswan- South Asia edition, 2020) theorizes the relationship between state power and legal violence by focusing on the intersection of law, science and policing though a study of forensic techniques-narco analysis, brainscans and lie detectors. The Truth Machines was the co-winner of the 2021 C. Herman Pritchett Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association and 2022 Faculty Winner of the Bela Kornitzer Prize for Non Fiction, Drew University. The book received an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Distinguished Book Award from the Asian Law and Society Association.
She is the author of Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India (New York University Press, 2011, Orient Blackswan 2012) and the co-editor with Nivedita Menon and Sadhna Arya of Feminist Politics: Struggles and Issues (in Hindi). Delhi: Hindi Medium Directorate, 2001. At Drew, she teaches courses titled Law, Justice and Society; Torture: Pain, Body and Truth; Policing and the Rule of Law; Political Theory, and Global Discourses on Human Rights.
