Mythri Jegathesan is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include plantations, work, gender, and labor materialities as they relate to projects of nationalism, state-building, and human rights and humanitarianism. Her current research focuses on the effectiveness of transitional justice among formerly displaced minorities in Sri Lanka's Northern Province and she has a second project on the imaging of Sri Lanka's plantation labor ecologies in film. She earned her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently President of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS).
Her book, Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka (University of Washington Press, 2019) is an ethnography of plantation life and work in the context of ethnonationalist violence and civil war in Sri Lanka and was awarded the 2020 Diana Forsythe Prize by the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC) and 2021 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize by the Association for Feminist Anthropology. She is editor of the Anthropology of Work Review from 2021 to 2025 and her work has appeared in Himal Southasian, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, SAMAJ, Dialectical Anthropology, Commoning Ethnography, e-flux journal, Polity, Colomboscope Interdisciplinary Art Festival, and Scroll Projects on Paper.
- Anthropology 3: Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
- Anthropology 11A/12A: Human Rights and Humanitarinism (Culture and Ideas I)
- Anthropology 112: Anthropological Methods
- Anthropology 114: Senior Project
- Anthropology 150: Religion, Culture and Society
- HONS 20/Difficult Dialogues: No Such Thing as a Free Gift