Tannistha Samanta is a sociologist and an aging studies scholar by training. She received her Master’s and PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland College Park. Before that, she had obtained graduate-level degrees in Economics from JNU, New Delhi and the University of Calcutta. Broadly, her research lies at the interdisciplinary crossroads of family sociology and gerontology involving themes around living arrangements, social capital, health policy, older adult sexualities and theory development in aging studies. In another line of inquiry, she examines the complex nexus of motherhood, sexual politics and the biomedical markets. Her work has been funded by research grants from the United Nations Population Fund, Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Government of Gujarat, Population Foundation of India, University of California, San Diego (School of Medicine), University of Haifa (Israel) and the Global Liberal Arts Alliance (GLAA). Recently, she was invited as a Mercator Fellow (Summer 2024) with the Universities of Tübingen and Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.
Apart from research, she remains committed to student engagement and contributing to an emerging community of early career researchers. In this role, she has mentored several graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and have served on academic committees and curriculum development boards.
Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of the journal, The Sociological Review (SAGE), the Journal of Aging Studies (Elsevier) and Social Theory & Health (Palgrave Macmillan). Prior to joining FLAME University, she was a faculty with the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India, where she taught undergrad and graduate students for about 8 years.
2024
2023
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2020
GRANTS (2020)