Serena Nanda was born on August 13, 1938, in New York City[1] and received her Doctor of Philosophy in anthropology from New York University.[2] She is the co-author of two anthropology textbooks: Culture Counts: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (5th Edition) and Cultural Anthropology (12th edition). Among her areas of specialty was the topic of gender diversity, having written the major reference book on the hijras of India.[3][4] As of August 2021, she was a professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.[5]
Awards
1990, Ruth Benedict Prize, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India[6]
Selected works
Urban Systems Analysis: An Anthropological Perspective, 1971
Social honor and informal social relationships : a study of kinship, friendship and neighbor relations in Bombay, India, 1973
Teaching Nonanthropology Majors, 1979
Cultural Anthropology. Van Nostrand, New York, New York, 1980, ISBN0-442-25736-8.
More Dialogue on the "Bloodthirsty" Semai, 1988
Neither Man nor Woman. The Hijras of India. Wadsworth, Belmont, California, 1990, ISBN0-534-12204-3.
American Cultural Pluralism and Law: An Innovative Interdisciplinary Course, 1990
Getting away with murder: Cultural diversity and the criminal justice system, 1994
Trouble in paradise: Native Hawaiians V. The United States of America, 1996
Goes With Everything, 1999
Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations., 2000, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc. ISBN1-57766-074-9.
North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment: From Prehistory to the Present , 2002
Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us: Perceptions and Representations of “the West” by Other Peoples of the World , 2003
South African Museums and the Creation of a New National Identity, 2004
with Joan Gregg and Beth Pacheco: 40 Perfect New York Days. Walks and Rambles in and around the City. iUniverse, New York, New York, 2004, ISBN0-595-29742-0.
Arranging a marriage in India, 2006
The gift of a bride : a tale of anthropology, matrimony, and murder, 2009
Assisted dying : an ethnographic murder mystery on Florida's gold coast, 2011
Motivating New Students, 2012
Gender diversity : crosscultural variations, second edition, 2014, Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. ISBN978-1-4786-1126-4.
Culture counts : a concise introduction to cultural anthropology, 2015
Love and marriage : cultural diversity in a changing world, 2019, Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. ISBN978-1-4786-3755-4.
References
^"Serena Nanda". www.seniorwomen.com. Retrieved 28 April 2019.