Surili Sheth

I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. My dissertation committee members are Pradeep Chhibber, Thad Dunning, Cecilia Mo, and Jennifer Bussell.

My research examines gender-based violence, paternalistic institutions, and women's behavior, particularly in South Asia and the United States. I employ mixed methods, including experiments, ethnography, archival research, and machine learning.

My work has been supported by the APSA Minority Fellowship, the Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Dissertation Fellowship, and 3ie. It has also been supported by grants from the Institute of International Studies (IIS), the Center on Contemporary India (CCI), the Center for Race and Gender (CRG), and the Center on the Politics of Development (CPD) at UC Berkeley.

I hold an MPA in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a B.S. in Economics and Political Science from The Ohio State University. I have worked as a development economics and policy professional for organizations such as J-PAL, IDinsight, IMAGO Global Grassroots, the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, and the World Bank, as well as with organizations such as SEWA, Transform Rural India, and the Ministry of Rural Development in Andhra Pradesh.

Dissertation project

Making Claims about Domestic Violence in India
Using mixed methods, this project investigates why and how women navigate making institutional claims in situations of domestic violence. I use results from a door-to-door survey experiment and survey (n=2000), fifteen months of ethnographic observation at and around an autonomous women's organization that provides counseling services to women and their families in situations of violence, and in-deth archival analyses and interviews with counselors to trace the institutional trajectories of approximately ~600 family dispute cases filed over 20 years at the organization.

Working Papers

Commonality or Difference? Sexual Assault and the Foundations of Women's Solidarities in the United States
Online survey experiments in the United States.

Seeing Like the State or Seeing the State? The Political Economy of Women's Self-Help Groups in Madhya Pradesh
With Arundhita Bhanjdeo, Nivedita Narain, and Michael Walton

Doubly Embedded: Women Front-Line Workers in India
With Arundhita Bhanjdeo, Nivedita Narain, and Michael Walton

Work in Progress

Case Anatomies: A Method for Tracing Domestic Violence Cases Between Formal and Informal Institutions
Developing a new method for tracing domestic violence cases and claim-making behavior.

Seeing Like a Computer: The Ethics and Methods of Using Natural Language Processing and OCR to Find Women in Rural Gujarat.
With Aarthi Muthukumar

Policy Reports

Women's Economic Empowerment in Pakistan: An Evidence Guided Toolkit for More Inclusive Policies
With Sofia Amaral, Pulkit Aggarwal, Anusha Guha, Osama Safeer, and Shirleen Manzur. South Asia Gender Innovation Lab (SARGIL), World Bank. 2024.

Other media and writing

Book Review: Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament by Shirin M. Rai and Carole Spary and Women, Power, and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India by Rachel E. Brulé
India Seminar Magazine Issue 752, She Rules!, April 2022.

Teaching

South Asian Politics (Undergraduate-level), Graduate Student Instructor for Pradeep Chhibber
Quantitative Analysis in Political Research (PhD-level), Graduate Student Instructor for Thad Dunning
Gender and International Human Rights (Undergraduate-level), Graduate Student Instructor for Helen Silverberg
The Varieties of Capitalism: The Political-Economic Systems of the World (Undergraduate-level), Graduate Student Instructor for Steven Vogel