Paola Bacchetta is Professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at University of California, Berkeley, and Director of Berkeley's Institute for Gender and Sexuality Research.
Her research and teaching interests are in: transnational decolonial feminist and queer theory; decolonial theory, postcolonial theory, epistemologies of the global south(s); theories of multiplicities (intersectionality, assemblages, articulational theorizations, co-formations and co-productions); social and critical theory; and theories of spatialities. She has published on thematics such as: political and religious conflict; right-wing movements; liberation-oriented movements, insurgencies, and liberation-oriented artistic expressions; and co-motion (alliances, coalitions, convergences, solidarities). Her geographical areas of concentration are France, India, U.S., and Italy.
Professor Bacchetta is author or contributing co-editor of the following book length works: Fatema Mernissi for Our Times (with Minoo Moallem, Syracuse University Press, 2025); Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, co-edited with Sunaina Maira and Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2019); Femminismi Queer Postcoloniali: critiche transnazionali all’omofobia, all’islamofobia e all’omonazionalismo (Queer Postcolonial Feminisms: Transnational Critiques of Homophobia, Islamophobia and Homonationalism, contributing co-editor with Laura Fantone. Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2015); Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS Women as Ideologues (sole author; India: Women Ink, 2004); Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (New York: Routledge; with Margaret Power, 2002); Textes du Mouvement Lesbien en France, 1970-2000 (Texts from the French Lesbian Movement, 1970-2000; On DVD; with Claudie Lesselier, 2011).
She has published over 70 journal articles and book chapters on her research, in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Danish. Her next book on feminist and queer alliances against coloniality, capitalism, racism, and misogyny, entitled Co-Motion: On Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances,, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.  Professor Bacchetta lectures widely within the U.S., Europe, Latin America and South Asia.
Professor Bacchetta was the first Chair of the Gender Consortium at Berkeley, which represents all research centers and teaching units on gender across the university. She also served as Co-Chair of the Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and Peoples’ Rights. She serves on the Advisory Boards, and is affiliated faculty within, the following research centers at University of California, Berkeley: Center for Race and Gender, and Center for Right-Wing Studies. She is Affiliated Professor in the following Berkeley research institutes and centers: Institute for South Asia Studies; Institute for European Studies; Center for Middle East Studies; Center for African Studies; Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures. She was a Steering Committee Member, and then an Executive Committee member, of the California-wide Center for New Racial Studies. She was the Director of the Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG), University of California, Berkeley’s research center on gender, sexuality and its intersections with other relations of power. As Director of BBRG she created the Visiting Scholars Program to include scholars who cannot be in residence for one year (the length of the Scholars in Residence Program) and instead desire to hold residencies at BBRG for six months or less. Professor Bacchetta is also a former Advisory Board member of Berkeley's Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures. In that capacity, she is co-founder, with Professors Karl Britto and Michael Lucey, of Berkeley's Queer of Color Reading Group. She is an Affiliated Faculty member of the Graduate Group in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.