Richa Nagar is Professor Emeritus of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the inaugural Gloria Steinem ’56 Endowed Chair in Women and Gender Studies at Smith College. Her multi-lingual and multi-genre work has blended scholarship, creative writing, theatre, and activism to build alliances with people’s struggles and to engage questions of ethics, responsibility, and justice.

Richa has published nine books and dozens of essays, articles, plays, and poems in English and Hindi. Her books in English include the series: Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India (2006), Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism (2014), and Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability (2019), published in South Asia as Radical Vulnerability: Development, Translation, Justice (2024). Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Marathi,  Turkish, and Urdu. Richa has worked closely with the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, a movement of farmers and laborers in India’s Sitapur District, since its founding, and she has co-created a multi-sited community theatre project called Parakh and the online journal, AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges.

Richa's many awards and honors include the 2020 International Studies Association’s Global Development Studies Book Award for Hungry Translations, the James Blaut Award for Socialist and Critical Geography, the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize Honorable Mention for Muddying the Waters, the Rumpus’s  Women’s History Celebration Listing for Playing with Fire, and the Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Chair in Excellence & the Beverly and Richard Fink Professorship in Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.  She has held visiting fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford University), the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (Jawaharlal Nehru University), the Centre for Humanities Research  (University of the Western Cape), and the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre (Savitribai Phule Pune University). Richa is a Fellow at the UMN Institute on the Environment.

Richa held the title of Professor of the College at UMN from 2015 until her retirement in 2024.  This article celebrates her legacy.