Lisa Mitchell is an anthropologist and historian of southern India. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include intellectual history and the movement of globally-circulating political ideas; multiple genealogies of democracy in India; political practice, public space, and the built environment; the cultural history of cement in South Asia; ethnography of informal urban credit networks; technology and infrastructure as they impact social, cultural, and political forms and everyday practices; neoliberalism and economic corridors; ethnographic approaches to the state; colonialism; and Telugu language and literature. She is the author of Hailing the State: Collective Assembly and the Politics of Recognition in the History of Indian Democracy (Forthcoming), and Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press, 2009 and Permanent Black, 2010), which was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities by the American Institute of Indian Studies.