Lalaie Ameeriar's research engages with anthropological theories of globalization and the state, transnational feminism, critical race theory, human rights and humanitarianism, with particular emphasis on transnational Muslim cultures. Professor Ameeriar's first book, Downwardly Global (Duke University Press) explores the intimate and affective politics of multicultural governance. Focusing on the transnational labor migration of Pakistani Muslim women to Toronto, it examines the sensorial registers by which immigrant bodies become legible to the state. It explores the promise of citizenship and the damage done to it by the threat of alterity. Her next research project explores the relationship between women's rights, human rights and humanitarianism through an analysis of legal protections involving cases of forced marriage and so called honor killings within Muslim communities in the United Kingdom. This research examines the relationship between the law and the community and between human rights and humanitarianism, particularly where these coalesce within discourses regarding women's rights in marginalized communities.
She has been a fellow at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. In 2010, Professor Ameeriar was named an Emerging Diversity Scholar by the National Center for Institutional Diversity at The University of Michigan. In 2014, she received the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. During the 2016-17 academic year, she will be a University of California President's Faculty Research Fellow in the Humanities and she will be a member of the School of Social Science at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
