The Asian Studies Program Annual Gandhi Lecture. Jyotsna Vaid ’76 to discuss the life and work of her late sister, the noted LGBTQ+ activist Urvashi Vaid ’79.

Urvashi Vaid (1958-2022) was a feminist, civil rights attorney, AIDS activist, writer, and fearless political strategist in the LGBTQ+ rights and liberation movement in the U.S. at a formative period of that movement’s history. From an early age, Urvashi was drawn to political activism. She worked tirelessly to achieve her vision of a free and more just society, particularly for the most vulnerable members of society. Politics, for Urvashi, was an act of faith, a faith in the belief that social change is possible. Over four decades she worked in different roles to address social, economic, and racial inequality within and beyond the LGBTQ+ movement. Urvashi was the author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995) and Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics (2012).

As her sister and co-editor of a 2025 collection of her writings (The Dream of a Common Movement, edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman, Duke University Press), Jyotsna Vaid ’76 will offer a portrait of Urvashi’s remarkable life, her pragmatic approach to creating change, and the liminal spaces that she lit along the way.

About Jyotsna Vaid ’76 

A graduate of Vassar College, Jyotsna Vaid earned a doctorate in experimental psychology at McGill University. She was a post-doctoral scholar at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a Fulbright scholar at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurological Sciences in India before joining Texas A&M University in 1986, where she is currently Professor of Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience and Affiliated Faculty in Women's and Gender Studies. Her primary research focuses on the impact of knowing multiple and diverse languages and writing systems. She has also examined cognitive processes underlying humor, and the role of gender and race in the construction of merit in academia. Besides co-editing The Dream of a Common Movement: Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid (2025), she has published two other books—Language Processing in Bilinguals: Psycholinguistic and Neuropsychological Perspectives (1986/2014) and Creative Thought (1997)—and over 150 scholarly articles and book chapters. A Fellow of many professional societies in her field, Vaid is Convenor of the South Asia Studies Working Group and was Founding Editor of two internationally circulated journals, Writing Systems Research and the Committee on South Asian Women Bulletin.

Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, the Political Science Department, Women, Feminist and Queer Studies Program and Office of the Dean of the Faculty.

This event is open to the public.