Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

Annu Daftuar is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Appalachian State University. Her research interests encompass globalization and fertility markets; assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and transnational reproductive justice; and critical race and critical caste studies.

She arrived at Appalachian in 2025 after completing her Ph.D. in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. She also has an MA in Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies from Texas Woman's University, an MA in Modern History from from the University of Delhi, and a BA in History (with honors) from the University of Delhi. 

In her doctoral work, Dr. Daftuar studied the evolution of commercial markets in India after the Indian government closed its borders to transnational surrogacy in 2015. Pushing against the Indian government's claim that a ban on surrogacy protects surrogates from exploitation, she highlights a mismatch between policy and the complex, on-the-ground realities of Indian surrogates. Using "feminist periscoping" as a methodology, as well as a mixed-methods approach, she argues that ARTs in India allow for "selective pronatalism" whereby support for reproduction through ARTs and surrogacy reinforce the eugenic project of Hindu-nationalist Brahmanical social order. Her work adds to ongoing feminist debates over surrogacy by centering the issue of caste in the workings of the domestic surrogacy market in India, which she contends has been ignored in global feminist knowledge production and activism.

Dr. Daftuar’s research and writing has been supported by multiple fellowship awards from Stony Brook University. She has presented her research at national and international conferences including  the National Women's Studies Association, the American Studies Association, and the South Asian Conference at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her work has also been published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals such as the Journal of International Women’s Studies and Economic and Political Weekly.

At Stonybrook University, Dr. Daftuar taught Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, Feminist Theories and Methods, Transnational Feminisms, and the Global Politics of Reproduction. She also received the Hartog Graduate Teaching Award for Outstanding Instructors from WGSS department at Stony Brook University. At Appalachian she routinely teaches Global Women's Issues and other courses in transnational feminist studies.