Irani graduated in 2004 from Stanford University with both a bachelor's degree in the Science, Technology, and Society program and a master's degree in computer science, specializing in human-computer interaction.[2] After working in user interface design at Google from 2003 to 2007,[3] she returned to graduate school, completing a Ph.D. in informatics at the University of California, Irvine in 2013.[2] Her dissertation, Designing Citizens in Transnational India, was supervised by Paul Dourish.[3]
She joined the University of California, San Diego faculty as an assistant professor of communications in 2013, and was tenured as an associate professor in 2019.[2] In 2023, she became the inaugural Faculty Director of the UC San Diego Labor Center.
Selected publications
Irani is the author of the book Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019),[4] which won the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for Science, Technology, Engineering, or Medicine of the American Anthropological Association[5] as well as the 2020 Outstanding Book Award of the International Communication Association.[6] She is also the coauthor, with Jesse Marx, of the book Redacted (Taller California Books, 2021).
Her journal and conference papers include:
Irani, Lilly; Vertesi, Janet; Dourish, Paul; Philip, Kavita; Grinter, Rebecca E. (2010), "Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development", in Mynatt, Elizabeth D.; Schoner, Don; Fitzpatrick, Geraldine; Hudson, Scott E.; Edwards, W. Keith; Rodden, Tom (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10-15, 2010, ACM, pp. 1311–1320, doi:10.1145/1753326.1753522, S2CID3128663
Ross, Joel; Irani, Lilly; Silberman, M. Six; Zaldivar, Andrew; Tomlinson, Bill (2010), "Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk", in Mynatt, Elizabeth D.; Schoner, Don; Fitzpatrick, Geraldine; Hudson, Scott E.; Edwards, W. Keith; Rodden, Tom (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2010, Extended Abstracts Volume, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10-15, 2010, ACM, pp. 2863–2872, doi:10.1145/1753846.1753873, S2CID11386257
Irani, Lilly; Silberman, M. Six (2013), "Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk", in Mackay, Wendy E.; Brewster, Stephen A.; Bødker, Susanne (eds.), 2013 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '13, Paris, France, April 27 - May 2, 2013, ACM, pp. 611–620, doi:10.1145/2470654.2470742, S2CID207203679
^ abIrani, Lilly Christine (2013), Designing Citizens in Transnational India, University of California, Irvine, ProQuest1413316761; see especially vita, p. xi.