Dr. Soundarya Iyer is an Assistant Professor at RV University, Bangalore and Associated Researcher at the French Institute of Pondicherry, India. She is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of agrarian change, climate change, gender, and livelihoods in India. She was the Sir Ratan Tata Post-Doctoral Fellow 2018-19 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore in the IDRC funded climate change project on Adaptation at Scale in Semi-arid Regions (ASSAR). She is currently Principal Investigator on a collaborative project with Prof. Nitya Rao funded by the Azim Premji University Research Funding Programme – 2019 which aims to understand the sociology of the decline in female labour force participation in rural Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Dr. Iyer defended her doctoral dissertation in 2017 from Manipal University, for which she worked at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore. Her doctoral dissertation traced the processes of rural transformation in three villages of Karnataka using mixed methods such as household surveys and semi-structured interviews.
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” - Joan Didion
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
2019 with Prof. Nitya Rao, University of East Anglia, UK for the project titled ‘Understanding the Sociology of Declining Rural Female Labour Force Participation Rate in India’ from November 2019 - October 2022.
funded by START International, Inc., for a research exchange to work with Prof. Nitya Rao, University of East Anglia, in 2018 on a project on migrant workers in Bangalore.