Ananya Roy is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Division of International & Area Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She also serves as Faculty Director of the Berkeley Programs for Study Abroad. Roy’s home department is the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley where she teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and international development. She currently serves as chair of the undergraduate Urban Studies major. In 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty.

Roy holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004). Her current research project is entitled Povertyscape: The New Global Order of Aid, Debt, and Development (Routledge, forthcoming 2007). The project has received several prestigious awards including the Hellman Faculty Award and the Prytanean Faculty Award, the latter being a research and leadership award given to one junior woman faculty member on the UC Berkeley campus each year. Most recently, the project received a research grant from the National Science Foundation.