Susan Bayly is Professor of Historical Anthropology (Emerita) in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology.

Her research focuses on colonialism and its cultural afterlife in Asia's former French and British colonies. She regularly conducts ethnographic research in Vietnam as part of a larger comparative project on empire and post-colonial transformations in a variety of periods and settings. Her publications include a study of Hanoi intelligentsia families in the former socialist world system. She has also explored the ways in which achievement is enacted and understood in Vietnam as part of an ESRC-funded comparative project with Professor Nick Long of LSE. Her more recent work has focused on familial and personal experiences of marketisation in today's Vietnam, building on fieldwork with Hanoi families from diverse urban backgrounds to document the ways in which women in particular reflect on the skills and moral capital to be attained from learning to hold their own as traders and service-sector workers in the key labour-deficit Asian 'tiger' states. She has also researched the many forms of official and personal visual culture that form a key context for the understanding of citizenship and moral agency in today's Hanoi, and she is currently developing a new project on women’s experiences of the white-collar Vietnamese workplace.

Professor Bayly serves on a voluntary basis as an international advisor to a number of Vietnam’s leading museums and cultural institutions. She retains a long-standing research interest in India, where she has focused on caste, religious conversion and a variety of translocal social and cultural movements. She is a former editor of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and has theoretical interests in the study of modernity, visuality, morality and ethical personhood, and the disciplinary interface between history and anthropology. Her recent publications include Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective: Essays on Morality, Achievement and Modernity (Berghahn Books: 2024). She has also published studies of the Indian caste system, and of Indian religion in its historical and anthropological contexts.