Mausumi Mahapatro

Dr. Mausumi Mahapatro completed her undergraduate education at Colorado College and was awarded a Thomas J. Watson fellowship to explore the pioneering Grameen Bank microcredit model in Bangladesh. Dr. Mahapatro completed her Master’s in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science and went on to do doctoral work in Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. She has worked extensively with international development organizations such as Action Aid and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The experience of living and working in South Asia has also provided her with a unique opportunity to examine theories relating to development economics and the extent to which they stand their ground in diverse contexts.

Dr. Mahapatro’s Ph.D. focused on international migration and how it can be a double-edged sword – wielding the power to develop rural communities but at the same time highly precarious and carrying with it the risks and uncertainties of cross-border mobility. In her research, she has argued that to comprehensively understand the causes of poverty, one must explore how wealth reproduces - that the framework of analysis should be relational and rooted in structures of inequality. Dr. Mahapatro’s most recent research has focused on refugee movements and particularly the state of the Rohingyas who have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh. As a fellow at the Center for the Study of War Experience, she has engaged in fieldwork in Kutupalong, the world’s largest refugee camp located in the southeastern belt of Bangladesh bordering Myanmar. She is particularly interested in how statelessness serves as an equalizer and the extent to which class differences in wealth are reproduced in fluid refugee contexts.

Dr. Mahapatro teaches Economics for Responsible Citizenship (EC200) which is part of the distributive core in addition to other courses that are offered as part of the Political Economy curriculum and the newly established Asian Pacific Studies minor. She also teaches a course on Refugees and Migrants as part of the integrative core. Dr. Mahapatro regularly involves students in collaborative research projects.