Anjali Vats, JD, PhD, is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law with a secondary appointment in Communication. She is interested in issues related to law, race, rhetoric, media studies, and science and technology studies, with a particular focus on intellectual property and racial justice. She teaches Torts, Copyright and Music, International Intellectual Property, and Critical Race Theory. She has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in race, technology, and media.
Vats' first award-winning monograph, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race and the Making of Americans (Stanford University Press, 2020), examines how copyright, patent, and trademark law and rhetoric intersect with logics of race and nationalism. She has published in law reviews and academic journals, including the Texas Law Review, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Communication, Culture & Critique. In 2017, Vats co-founded Race + IP, a biennial conference dedicated to the study of race and intellectual property, which she continues to co-organize. From 2014 to 2021, Vats was Associate Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies, with a courtesy appointment in law, at Boston College. In 2016-2017, while on an AAUW Postdoctoral Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Law Professor at UC Davis School of Law. She was also previously a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, where she was affiliated with the Center for Intellectual Property Research at the Maurer School of Law. Vats' scholarship and activism have been recognized by the Open Society Foundations, American Association of University Women, and Ford Foundation, among others. Before becoming a professor, Vats clerked for the now-retired Chief Justice A. William Maupin of the Supreme Court of Nevada. Vats is licensed to practice law in Washington and Michigan.
- LLM, University of Washington School of Law
- JD, Emory University School of Law
- PhD, University of Washington
- BA, BS, Michigan State University
