Susan Thomas

Susan Thomas is Associate Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education and a Senior Research Associate with the South Asia Center. Trained as an educational anthropologist, her work exists at the intersection of international education, migration studies, and critical university studies, with a particular emphasis on South Asia and South Asian diasporas.

Education

• Ph.D. Education, Culture, and Society, University of Pennsylvania
• B.A. International Affairs, The George Washington University

Research & Scholarship

Research Focus:

International education, transnational migration, South Asia/South Asian diaspora, debt, precarity, race and caste politics, student resistance, violence, and ethnographic inquiry.

Recent Publications

Public Writing

• Thomas, Susan. (April 2025). How the U.S. Betrayed International Students. TIME Magazine.

Books

• Thomas, Susan. (2024). Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University (University of Chicago Press).
• Thomas, Susan, and Antonio Tiongson (Eds.). Genealogies of Anti-Asian/Asia Violences (under contract with Fordham University Press).

Articles and Chapters

• Thomas, Susan. 2021. Difference and Dissent in the Neoliberal University: Relational Geographies of Race, Caste, and Violence. [Published online 2019] Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 42(3): 368-380.
• Thomas, Susan. 2018. Student-Migrants and the Diasporic Imagination: Educational Migration, Nationhood, and the Making of Indian Diaspora in the United States. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 21(2): 255-272.
• Thomas, Susan.  2017. The Precarious Path of Student Migrants: Education, Debt, and Transnational Migration among Indian Youth. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(11): 1873-1889.
• Thomas, Susan.  2014. The Neoliberal Turn in US Higher Education: Implications for Indian F-1 Students’ Negotiations of Belonging. In J. Koyama & M. Subramanian (Eds.), Education in a World of Migration: Implications for Policy and Practice. New York: Routledge.
• Thomas, Susan. 2013 [Review of the book Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World, by V. Fong]. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 44(2).

Professional Affiliations

• Comparative and International Education Society
• American Studies Association
• American Anthropological Association
• Association for Asian American Studies