Paromita Sanyal is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. She has also served as faculty in Cornell and Wesleyan University and received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard. She specializes in development, gender, economic and political sociology. Her research focuses on examining microcredit groups, self-help groups, and microfinance programs through a sociological lens and understanding their influence on women’s lives in developing countries, such as India, and understanding political participation of citizens in institutions of deliberative democracy. She (along with Vijayendra Rao) is the author of Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She has also authored ‘Credit to Capabilities: A Sociological Study of Microcredit Groups in India’, published by Cambridge University Press, which won the 'outstanding book award' from the American Sociological Association’s section on development. Her articles have appeared in the American Sociological Review, Qualitative Sociology, Social Forces and other journals. She is a member of the World Bank’s Social Observatory team.