Sumangala Damodaran

Sumangala Damodaran is an academician and musician, whose experience spans teaching and research in Economics, Development Studies and Popular Music Studies. She has taught in Delhi University and Ambedkar University Delhi over a period of three decades and is presently Director, Gender and Economics with the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs). She is also visiting professor at Ashoka University, the University of Cape Town and the Institute for Human Development, Delhi. As a development economist, her research and publications fall broadly within the rubric of Industrial and Labour studies and more specifically on Industrial Organisation, Global Value Chains, the Informal Sector, Labour and Migration. Apart from her academic involvements as an economist and social scientist, she is also a singer and composer. Her archiving and documentation of the musical tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association from the 1940s and 1950s has resulted in a book titled “The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the IPTA” (Tulika Books) and an album titled ‘Songs of Protest’ and  she has performed from the documented repertoire extensively in different parts of the country and abroad. She has collaborated with poets and musicians from South Africa as a founder member of the award-winning Insurrections Ensemble, which has produced six music albums and has also directed a multi-institutional project around Music and Migration in Precolonial Afro-Asia from 2016 until the present, which has resulted in two musical productions and a book titled ‘Maps of Sorrow’, to be released in August 2023 (Tulika Books).