Laavanya Kathiravelu is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Her research is at the intersections of international migration, race and ethnic studies and contemporary urban diversity, particularly in Asia and the Persian Gulf. Her first book was Migrant Dubai (Palgrave, 2016), which explored experiences of low-wage migrant workers in the UAE. She has also published widely on issues of race, inequality, and migration in Singapore. Prior to joining NTU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She was also a Fung Fellow at Princeton University between 2015-16. In 2019, she was the recipient of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Fellowship (SSHRF) and recognized as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons (TOYP) in the area of academic leadership. Laavanya is a board member of the migrant welfare organisation, HOME as well as the civil society group AWARE, whose aim is to advance gender equality. She comments regularly on public forums and through op-eds on issues of migration, race, and diversity in Singapore. In 2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar based at the City University of New York (CUNY).