Teraya Paramehta

Born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, Teraya Paramehta is a faculty member of Universitas Indonesia (on academic leave) and Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity, and on-track to receive a Graduate Certificate in Visual Anthropology, at USC Dornsife. Her dissertation, tentatively titled (Re)Making Paradise: Race, Tourism, and the Aftermath of Violence in Bali, explores the production and construction of how Bali became paradise and how activists’ and residents’ responses to violence in Bali (e.g., the anti-communist mass killings of 1965-1966, the terrorist attacks of 2002 and 2005, and environmental injustice) disrupted and remade the imagined paradise. Reworking the idea of “entanglement” as a metaphor for transpacific lives, the dissertation suggests that “entanglement” becomes more permanent after violent rupture happens. Nonetheless, there are moments of loosenessbefore the seemingly harmonious threads are forcefully pulled into a knot, suffocating those who are entangled in the threads. Bridging anthropology of tourism and scholarship on postcoloniality in Transpacific Studies and Ethnic Studies, the dissertation adds to a growing conversation on tourism and militarism in Transpacific Studies, from which Bali/Indonesia is largely absent. She is a Fulbright scholar (2011-2013), Indonesia Endowment for Education (LPDP) awardee (2017-2021), PEO International Fellow (2018-2020), and AAUW International Fellow (2022).

• MA , San Francisco State University, 5/2013
• BA , Univ. of Indonesia