Saba Joshi's  research and teaching interests lie in the intersecting fields of feminist studies, the comparative politics of state formation and land governance, with a geographical focus on South and Southeast Asia. Her doctoral thesis explored “land grabbing”, or dispossession due to state-led large-scale land acquisitions for agro-industrial development, in Cambodia, through the lenses of gender, resistance and state formation. Articles from her doctoral thesis have been published in Third World Quarterly and Globalizations. 

Saba holds a doctorate in Political Science/International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland (2020). She obtained her MA degree in Politics and International Studies at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (2012) and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (2009). She completed her BA in History at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi (2004). Previously, she has been a visiting scholar at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and the Centre for East and Southeast Asia at Lund University, Sweden. 

During her doctoral studies, Saba worked as a part of a six-year multidisciplinary academic research project examining gender equality, the right to food and land commercialization in Cambodia and Ghana, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and Swiss Development Corporation. Prior to that, She held professional appointments at the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland and Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ahmedabad, India.

Saba's current research is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Early post-doc mobility grant. In her project, she will examine gendered resistance against Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in India. She is particularly interested in understanding the impacts of subnational governance on women’s contentious politics against land acquisitions and developing a comparative framework for the understanding the influence of institutional geographies of land governance on trajectories and forms of women’s political participation in movements countering large-scale land acquisitions in India. During her time at ODID, Saba will be working closely with Professor Nikita Sud.