Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and an Associate Professor of Law at the Emory University School of Law. Her research uniquely intersections ethnographic fieldwork, anthropological theory, and legal doctrine to evaluate legal systems, labor dynamics, and conceptions of personhood. She earned her A.B. in Politics from Princeton University, followed by a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Before joining the Emory faculty in 2023, she served as an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Alabama and was a Sharswood Fellow in Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
Her scholarship splits into two main areas: work law (specifically worker autonomy in the gig economy and academic tenure) and comparative constitutional law and religion, focusing primarily on India and the United States. She has authored notable books, including Beyond the Algorithm (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and The Battle for Sabarimala (Oxford University Press). Her crossover monograph, The War on Tenure (Cambridge University Press, 2025), exploring academic labor protections, was recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Books in Higher Education. Acevedo serves as the Editor-in-Chief of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. In 2025, she was selected as an SVPR Research Impact Faculty Fellow at Emory to shape university public scholarship. Her research has earned support from the Fulbright Scholar program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council.