Anneeth Kaur Hundle, UC Irvine anthropology associate professor and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies, has been named the recipient of the 2024 Frances M. Leslie DECADE Mentor Excellence Award. The honor, given by the Office of Inclusive Excellence, recognizes exemplary work supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion in UCI's graduate programs. The award spotlights Hundle’s efforts to improve Ph.D. program climate, equity, and diversity as one of the school’s outstanding mentors in the Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience program, established in 2010 by Frances Leslie, then-dean of UCI’s Graduate Division for whom the honor is named.

Hundle joined the UC Irvine Department of Anthropology in 2019. She has held previous appointments at UC Berkeley, UC Merced and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. As an interdisciplinary and feminist scholar grounded in anthropological approaches, her research program weaves together several core fields of study including Sikh and Punjab diaspora studies; Africa-Asia and South Asian and African diaspora studies; Uganda and African studies; citizenship, violence and minoritization; feminist anthropology; the anthropology of race, religion and caste, critical race and ethnic studies, the anthropology of religion and critical secularism studies, and critical university studies.

As the inaugural chair in Sikh Studies, Hundle contributes to the study of the Sikh religion and culture in transnational, global and comparative frameworks, including engagement with Sikh communities and the public sphere in the U.S. and North America. She has advised many doctoral students who have benefited from her rich research program and expertise, and she teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses to increase understandings of the complexity and diversity of Sikh experience and their relationships with other communities, including Global Themes in Sikh Studies, Sikh Feminist Anthropology, Anthropologies of Race, Religion and Caste and Interrogating Citizenship. Her work is featured in her monograph, Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda (Duke University Press), several book chapters in edited volumes including Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (Zed Press) and The Sikh World (Routledge World Series) and articles that have appeared in journals such as  American Anthropologist, Critical Ethnic Studies, Public Culture, Feminist Review, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Journal of Eastern African Studies and others. Currently, Hundle is associate editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, where she is working with a UCI doctoral student to develop a special forum called “Locating Nikki Haley in Sikh and South Asian American Discourse.”