Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and employment law scholar on the faculty at Emory University School of Law. For the last five years, Deepa has been studying tenure as an employment protection and she built the only national dataset of tenured-terminations. Her accessible, entertaining, qualitatively and quantitatively informed book on tenure-stream employment, The War on Tenure, was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2025.
Deepa holds a JD and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and an AB in Politics from Princeton, She has taught at UChicago, Penn Law, Alabama Law, and Emory Law; her scholarship has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. Deepa is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Political and Legal Anthropology Review, a past Associate Editor of Law & Society Review, and has held leadership positions in legal, social science, and interdisciplinary scholarly associations. In addition to her legal and social science training, Deepa brings familiarity with business and STEM scholarly cultures and an appreciation of organizational behavior to her explorations of higher ed.
Deepa’s goal is to foster better mutual understanding between university stakeholders (faculty, students, administrators, staff), and between university stakeholders and the public. She believes that process can be engaging and entertaining, and the best compliment she’s ever received from an audience member is that he thought he was at a TedX talk. She looks forward to speaking with, and learning from, your community.