Maya Kalyanpur is Professor and Chair, Department of Learning and Teaching at the University of San Diego, having received her PhD in Special Education from Syracuse University. She started her career as a teacher of children with intellectual disabilities in India, and was a Professor in the Departments of Special Education at Towson University, Maryland, and Inclusive and Special Education at the State University of New York at Potsdam. She worked as an international consultant in inclusive education with the national Ministries of Education in Cambodia and Laos PDR, the World Bank, UNICEF, and Catholic Relief Services. She was a faculty member of the Study Abroad program on human trafficking and girls’ education in Cambodia which received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Internationalization in 2014. She co-founded the Proteep project, which supports girls to complete high school in Cambodia.
Her research interests focus on the intersection of culture and special education, indigenous epistemologies of disability, and international development and disability studies. In 2017, she received a Fulbright Flex research award to conduct a study on language and learning disability in India. Her most recent book, Disability studies in South Asia: Redefining boundaries and extending horizons, co-edited with Shridevi Rao, The College of New Jersey, presents an alternative analysis to disability appropriate to South Asia. Her books co-authored with Beth Harry, University of Miami, offer cultural reciprocity as an approach towards building reciprocal relationships between professionals and families of children with disabilities from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.