Past Visiting Scholars

2020-2021

Akshaya Tankha

I am an art historian working on modern and contemporary South Asian art and visual culture, with a focus on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, postcolonialism, and Indigeneity in India. I am currently working on a book project based on my doctoral dissertation, “An Aesthetics of Endurance: art, visual culture and Indigenous presence in Nagaland, India”, which examines craft objects, memorial monuments and house museums in Nagaland, northeast India and Indian discourses of “tribal” craft to demonstrate the ever-changing formation of Indigenous lifeworlds and their settler-colonial marginalization in postcolonial India. Nagaland is a predominantly Indigenous and Christian state in India, on the border with Myanmar and close to China, which was home to an armed movement for political autonomy from the Indian state from 1953 to 1997, when a ceasefire agreement between the Indian state and Naga nationalists brought the decades long armed conflict to a provisional halt that remains the basis of a tenuous stability. “An Aesthetics of Endurance” argues that objects of art and visual culture in post-ceasefire Nagaland materialize temporally plural and layered conceptions of time and space that challenge the popular and scholarly relegation of the Indigenous present to an archaic past or a ruptured present, showcasing an aesthetics of endurance and emergence that reflects the plural temporality of art and the present that we all inhabit. I am also in the early stages of a new project that explores Indigenous cinematic, graphic and new media practices as material assemblages of informal markets, neoliberalism, Indigenous affect and inter-Asian imaginaries of space and place in the northeast Indian borderlands.

2019-2020

Neelam Khoja

Neelam Khoja is a historian of trans-imperial and trans-regional early modern and modern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Her research interests include political and social history of Muslim empires and nation-states within the Persianate zone from the 16th-20th centuries. Khoja received her doctorate from Harvard University in Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies from the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department and holds Master’s degrees in Islamic Studies from Claremont Graduate University and Harvard Divinity School. At Yale, she will work on her first monograph, tentatively titled, Known Geographies: Afghan Sovereigns, Space, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Iran and Hindustan. The book situates Afghans within the context of Safavid and Mughal decline and rise of European imperialism during the long eighteenth century. The monograph examines questions of migration, space, ethnic identity, and constructions of sovereignty through Afghan histories, genealogies, and poetry alongside non-Afghan histories, memoirs, travel literature, and administrative records written in Braj, French, Dutch (in translation), Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu. The book argues for a new theory of Eurasian land migration, called “known geographies” within the Persianate zone that transgresses modern nation-state boundaries.

Dr. Khoja’s research has been generously supported by numerous grants, including Fulbright, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, American Institute of Iranian Studies, American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, and Harvard University’s Graduate Society of Fellows, South Asia Institute, and Asia Center.

Ranu Roychoudhuri

Ranu Roychoudhuri comes to the ISM from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, where she is assistant professor of humanities and social sciences. She is a historian of photography and art with interests in South Asian studies, postcolonial theory, popular visual culture, and the intellectual history of art. During her fellowship year, she will work on a project entitled Theology, Politics, and Art: Documentary Photographs from Post-Emergency Calcutta, which will analyze layered conversations between documentary photography and Christian social thought in postcolonial India by looking into institutional histories as well as the material and intellectual histories of those photographs. 

Adeem Suhail

Adeem Suhail is a social anthropologist whose work broadly pertains to issues in the anthropology of politics and the politics of knowledge production. His research interests are situated at the intersection of the anthropology of violence, state theory, and urban anthropology. He is  currently working on a manuscript interrogating how the periodic recruitment and subsequent dismantling of groups that wield non-state violence abets the maintenance of political order. The project addresses the relationship between temporality, desire and processes of rule-making and is based on extended field research in Atlanta, Georgia and Karachi, Pakistan. Adeem received his PhD from Emory University and has offered courses in anthropology at universities in the US and in Pakistan.

2018-2019

Sushant Singh
Sushant Singh is the Deputy Editor of The Indian Express newspaper in India where he has been awarded the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism. He reports on national security, strategic affairs, higher judiciary and functioning democratic institutions. A former military officer, he has served with the United Nations in Cote d’Ivoire. He is the author of Mission Overseas: Daring Operations by the Indian Military and the co-author of Note by Note: The India Story 1947-2017.
Naveena Naqvi

Naveena Naqvi is a historian of early modern and modern South Asia. Her research interests include the Persianate world (ca. 13th-19th centuries), the history of political Islam and the social history of Hindustani music. She joins us from the History Department at UCLA.

2013-2014

Asiya Alam

Asiya Alam received her PhD in Spring 2013 from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research focuses on the debates and discussions concerning family and marriage among Muslim communities in colonial north India from the late- nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. She will teach courses on modern South Asian History and Women and Islam in South Asia.

Kedar Kulkarni

Kedar Kulkarni completed his PhD in Spring 2013 from the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He specializes in Marathi musical theater of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through which he examines larger themes of nationalism, popular culture, gender and class subjectivies. He will offer courses on Indian theater and cinema during the last century.

Rajashree Mazumder

Rajashree Mazumder received her PhD in History at UCLA in Spring 2013. Her research examines Indian immigration to Burma from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. At Yale, she will teach a course on Indian Ocean history.

Sadia Saeed

Sadia Saeed, (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology, Scholar of Pakistan), is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. Sadia received her PhD in sociology from University of Michigan in 2010. Her research focuses on intersections among nationalism, politics, law and religion in Pakistan. She is currently working on her book manuscript, provisionally titled Politics of Exclusion: Muslim Nationalism, State Formation and Legal Representations of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan, which examines the relationship between state formation, Islamist social movements and nationalist discourses in Pakistan through a focus on the shifting legal representations of the heterodox religious minority, the Ahmadiyya community. Her research has appeared in the journal Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.

Stan Scott

Stan Scott (Fall 2012) holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Along with research interests that include the vocal music of North India, Bengali folk song, Irish traditional music, American folk music, and musical transmission and pedagogy, Stan is also accomplished as a vocalist and on the Indian harmonium, tabla, five-string banjo, and guitar. Stan’s dissertation is titled “Power and Delight: Vocal Training in North Indian Classical Music”. He will be a visiting faculty member with the Council in Spring 2012, when he will offer the course Indian Musical Traditions.

2012-2013

Ashok Acharya

Ashok Acharya (Rice Visiting Lecturer in Global Justice and South Asian 
Studies), is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Joint Director, Developing Countries Research Centre at the University of Delhi.  At Yale, Ashok will be a Rice Visitor in the Global Justice Program & South Asian Studies at the MacMillan Center.  He is author of the forthcoming volume Equality, Difference and Group Rights: The Case of India, based on his dissertation research at the University of Toronto, and edited Citizenship in Globalizing World (Pearson, 2012) and Political Theory: An Introduction (Pearson: 2008).  His research interests encompass contemporary and comparative political theory, liberalism, affirmative action, equal opportunity, citizenship, rights, multiculturalism, and ethics and public policy.  

Dipti Khera

Dipti Khera has graduate training in Art History, Museum Anthropology, and Architecture which has proved invaluable in expanding her understanding of images, objects, and monuments within their historical and contemporary milieu. Her dissertation, titled, “Picturing India’s “Land of Princes” Between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and its Environs,” has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, American Institute of Indian Studies, Yale Center for British Art, and Columbia University. Dipti served as an assistant curator for the exhibition “Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj,” that showcased for the first time eclectic silverware made by Indian craftsmen for European consumption and addressed changing notions of taste and design in nineteenth century South Asia. In 2011-2012 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, at Yale, she will offer two undergraduate courses on the themes of cross-cultural encounters and the visualization of place and travel in South Asian art and history.

Rasika Khanna

Rasika Khanna (Fall 2012) is a Visiting Fellow at the SASC. She is the daughter of Renu and Krishen Khanna, the artist, was initiated into the Bharatnatyam by the legendary Smt. Balasaraswathi in Chennai. Throughout her school and college days she trained under Smt Lalitha Shastri of Kalashetra, in Delhi and performed her Arangetram in 1971. She received the Government of India cultural scholarship to learn with Guru Adayar Lakshman in Chennai between 1973 and 1976. She later got senior research fellowship to study Kshetraiyya padam from Smt. Kalanidhi Narayanan. Rasika learnt the fine points of dramatic presentation from Guru Nana Kasar who taught her for 19 years.

Shailaja Paik

Shailaja Paik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Cincinatti. She received her PhD in History from Warwick University, in the United Kingdom and has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Women’s History, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Economic and Political Weekly and the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. Her research interests encompass modern South Asia, Dalit Studies, Women, Gender and Feminism, Social and Political movements, Oral history, and Caste and Race. Based on her dissertation research, Shailaja is currently preparing a book manuscript which uses the lens of education to examine the social and cultural history of Dalit women in Maharashtra (Western India), from 1930 to1990.

Jennifer Bussel

Jennifer Bussell, (Visiting Assistant Professor of South Asian Politics), is an Assistant Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research focuses on comparative politics, the political economy of development, and South Asia. Her book, Corruption and Reform In India: Public Services in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press, 2012), draws on fieldwork in seventeen Indian states, as well a citizen survey and field experiment. Her previous research has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Studies in International Development, and is forthcoming in Economic and Political Weekly. She received a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. During the fall 2012 semester, she will be teaching a seminar for undergraduate and graduate students titled “The Political Economy of Natural Disasters,” with emphasis on natural disasters in South Asia.

Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot, (Research Scholar in South Asian Studies, Fall 2012), is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Research, in Paris, France. He is widely known for his extensive research on Hindu nationalism, caste politics and identity issues in Pakistan. For several years, Christophe has co-taught the Yale undergraduate course “India and Pakistan: Democracy, Conflict and Development”(Political Science 461) with colleagues in Yale’s Department of Political Science.

Tanika Sarkar

Tanika Sarkar (Dhawan Visiting Professor of South Asian History, Spring 
2013), is an acclaimed historian of women’s histories and social movements in colonial and post-colonial India. She is Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and is the author of numerous books including, Bengal 1928-34 : The Politics of Protest ( Oxford, 1987 ); Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (Permanent Black„ Indiana University Press and Hurst , 2001 ), and Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (Permanent Black and Seagull, 2009), and has published widely in numerous journals and edited book volumes. Her more recent research focuses on the rise of the Hindu right and particularly on the implications and impacts for women in the emergence of contemporary right-wing Hindu movements in India.

2011-2012

Bernard Bate

Bernard Bate, PhD University of Chicago, 2000, is a Visiting Scholar at the MacMillan Center.  He focuses on Tamil South Asia, language, politics, gender and the historical ethnography of language. His first book, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic(Columbia University Press, 2009), examines political and literary oratory in the contexts of its production in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Two book-length projects on the relationship between language, the political, and the large-scale structure and imaginings of social order are currently underway. The first project, Speaking the Public Sphere: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern, outlines a genealogy of Tamil oratory, from the Protestant sermon to the political oration.  A second book project, called Beyond Rhetoric: The Anthropology of Oratory and Political Practice, directs linguistic anthropological concerns towards a general scholarly audience, and will offer new ways of looking at the oratorical practices that have become the communicative groundwork of modern politics in societies across the planet.

Daniela Bredi

Daniela Bredi (Fall 2011) is a Visiting Fellow from the University Sapienza of Rome (Italy), where she is Associate Professor of History of Islam in South Asia and Lecturer in Muslim Law in the Department of Oriental Studies, and where she also teaches Urdu language and literature. Her research focuses on questions of national integration, gender, and the relation of law and society. Recent publications include “Continuity and change in women‘s role in Indo-Muslim society seen through a few female members of the Tyabji family”, in Colonialism, Modernity and Religious Identities: Studies In South Asian Reform Movements (Oxford, 2008) and “The Destiny of Urdu in Independent India” in Redefining Urdu Politics in India (Oxford, 2006).

Sana Haroon

Sana Haroon is appointed as the Malathy Singh Visiting Lecturer and Postdoctoral Associate for academic year 2011-2012. Holding a PhD in History from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Sana has recently published a book titled Frontier of Faith: Islam and the Indo-Afghan Borderland (Hurst and Co., London 2007, and Columbia University Press, New York 2008). During her tenure, Sana will teach two courses: Islam in Contemporary Pakistan and South Asia and the Gulf.

Rasika Khanna

Rasika Khanna is a Visiting Fellow at the SASC. She is the daughter of Renu and Krishen Khanna, the artist, was initiated into the Bharatnatyam by the legendary Smt. Balasaraswathi in Chennai. Throughout her school and college days she trained under Smt Lalitha Shastri of Kalashetra, in Delhi and performed her Arangetram in 1971. She received the Government of India cultural scholarship to learn with Guru Adayar Lakshman in Chennai between 1973 and 1976. She later got senior research fellowship to study Kshetraiyya padam from Smt. Kalanidhi Narayanan. Rasika learnt the fine points of dramatic presentation from Guru Nana Kasar who taught her for 19 years.

Eungu Lee

Eungu Lee is Professor a Visiting Professor from the Department of Indian Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Kyounggi-do, Korea. He is the author of An Introduction to Indian Studies (Gaon Publications, 2007), Indian Mythology (Sechang Media, 2003), and Indian Cinema (Sechang Media, 2003), and has translated Indian literature, including Selected Short Stories of Premchand (Hansungmunwha Press, 2003).

Sadia Saeed

Sadia Saeed is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. Sadia received her PhD in sociology from University of Michigan in 2010. Her research focuses on intersections among nationalism, politics, law and religion in Pakistan. She is currently working on her book manuscript, provisionally titled Politics of Exclusion: Muslim Nationalism, State Formation and Legal Representations of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan, which examines the relationship between state formation, Islamist social movements and nationalist discourses in Pakistan through a focus on the shifting legal representations of the heterodox religious minority, the Ahmadiyya community. Her research has appeared in the journal Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.

Arupjyoti Saikia

Arupjyoti Saikia is a Program Fellow with the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies. He is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. He is the author of A History of Rural Politics: Assam 1940-1980 (Routledge, forthcoming 2011) and Forests and Ecological History of Assam: 1860-1900 (Oxford, 2010).

Juned Shaikh

Juned Shaikh, a postdoctral associate with the Council, holds a PhD in History from the University of Washington, Seattle. Drawing together research interests in modern South Asia, labor history, urban history, comparative colonialism and Dalit studies, Juned’s dissertation is titled “Dignity and Dalit Social Imaginaries: Entanglements of Caste, Space, and Ideologies in Mumbai, 1898-1997”. His work on labour history, and caste politics, was recently recognized by the Association of Asian Studies’ as the best graduate student paper in the field of South Asian Studies, and he has published in India Reviewand Economic and Political Weekly. Juned will offer the courses: Urban Imaginaries in India and History of Modern South Asia.

Rochisha Narayan

Rochisha Narayan, a postdoctoral associate with the Council, holds a PhD in History from Rutgers University, New Jersey. Her dissertation title is, “Caste, Family and Politics in Northern India during the Eighteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”. Rochisha has contributed entries on Indira Gandhi and Sucheta Kripalani for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Drawing on research interests encompassing women, gender, caste and family, she will offer courses on Women in Modern India and Family and Caste and Religion in Early Modern South Asia, c 1500-1800.

Madhavi Murty

Madhavi Murty holds a PhD from the Department of Communications at the University of Washington in Seattle and will join the Council as a visiting faculty member is Spring 2012. Her dissertation, “Tales of a Nation Unbound: Mass Media and the Remaking of Gender, Caste and Religion in Post-Reform India”, combines research interests in feminism and gender, cultural studies, popular culture and nationalism. She has authored and co-authored publications in Signs, Thirdspace:A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture, and Popular Communication. Madhavi will offer a course titled Gender and Media in India in Spring 2012.

Stan Scott

Stan Scott holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Along with research interests that include the vocal music of North India, Bengali folk song, Irish traditional music, American folk music, and musical transmission and pedagogy, Stan is also accomplished as a vocalist and on the Indian harmonium, tabla, five-string banjo, and guitar. Stan’s dissertation is titled “Power and Delight: Vocal Training in North Indian Classical Music”. He will be a visiting faculty member with the Council in Spring 2012, when he will offer the course Indian Musical Traditions.

2010-2011

Ian Desai

Ian Desai, PhD, History, University of Oxford, UK, 2009. His dissertation title is, “Producing the Mahatma: Communication, Community & Political Theatre Behind the Gandhi Phenomenon: 1893 – 1942”. His research interests include transnational history, cultural studies, book history, and social enterprise history. His two courses will be: Modern Indian History and Mahatma: The Making of a Modern Leader.

Rasika Khanna

Rasika Khanna, will be a Visiting Fellow for the Fall semester at the SASC. She is the daughter of Renu and Krishen Khanna, the artist, was initiated into the Bharatnatyam by the legendary Smt. Balasaraswathi in Chennai. Throughout her school and college days she trained under Smt Lalitha Shastri of Kalashetra, in Delhi and performed her Arangetram in 1971. She received the Government of India cultural scholarship to learn with Guru Adayar Lakshman in Chennai between 1973 and 1976. She later got senior research fellowship to study Kshetraiyya padam from Smt. Kalanidhi Narayanan. Rasika learnt the fine points of dramatic presentation from Guru Nana Kasar who taught her for 19 years.

Rasika has performed professionally on many prestigious platforms both in India and abroad. She has taken her art to the US, Europe, Canada, African countries and Pakistan. In the last couple of years, she has also performed in Moscow, the St. Petersburg Palace festival, Singapore and Bali.

Gijs Kruijtzer

Gijs Kruijtzer, PhD History, Leiden University, 2008. In 2009, the outcome of his PhD research was published by Leiden University Press under the title “Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India”. He is currently working on a new project entitled “The Ethics of Exception”, which aims to investigate attitudes towards moral authority and individual judgment in the early modern period, comparing the “Persianate” world (South Asia, Iran, Central Asia) and the “Latinate” world (Western Europe). He will be offering the courses: Visions of South Asia 1500-1800 and Islam in South Asia 1000-Present.

Mrinalini Rajagopalan

Mrinalini Rajagopalan, PhD Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 2007. Her dissertation title is, “The Modern Lives of Medieval Monuments: The Intersection of Nation and Aesthetics in Delhi, India”. Her research interest include: the colonial legacies of urbanization and urbanism in South Asia and the Middle East; the contemporary ramifications of globalization and neo-liberalism in global urban contexts and the study of tourism in the constructions and contestations of urban space. She will be offering two courses: Cities in South Asia and Visual Cultures of Urban Modernity in South Asia.

Stan Scott

Stan Scott, PhD, Ethnomusicology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, 1997. His dissertation title is, “Power and Delight: Vocal Training in North Indian Classical Music”. His research areas include vocal music of North India, Bengali folk song, Irish traditional music, American folk music, and musical transmission and pedagogy. He will be offering a course on Indian Musical Traditions with an emphasis on classical music in Spring 2011.

Mark Turin

Mark Turin, PhD, Linguistics, Leiden University, 2006, is a linguistic anthropologist. He is currently a Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he directs both the recently established World Oral Literature Project, an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record, and the Digital Himalaya Project which he co-founded in 2000 as a platform to make multi-media resources from the Himalayan region widely available online. He has also held research appointments at Cornell and Leipzig universities, and the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Sikkim, India. From 2007 to 2008, he served as Chief of Translation and Interpretation at the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN). He writes and lectures on ethnolinguistics, visual anthropology, digital archives and fieldwork methodology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author or coauthor of four books, the editor of four volumes and has published numerous articles and book chapters.

2009-2010

Osmund Bopearachchi

Osmund Bopearachchi, PhD Archaeology, Sorbonne University, Paris, 1987, and Professor at CNRS, Paris. His interests include classical Indian numismatics; ancient art and material culture of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia and India; and Buddhism in Sri Lanka and India, among other things. He will offer two undergraduate and two graduate courses, including Buddhism and Hinduism in Gandhara, and Buddhism and Trade in Sri Lanka.

Ashish Chadha

Ashish Chadha, PhD Anthropology, Stanford University 2007. His research interests lies in the theoretical and methodological; archeological discourses pertaining to South Asia. Ashish will be offering two courses in the 09-10 academic year: Science, State and Technology in India and Understanding Bollywood: the Cultural Logic of popular South Asian Cinema.

Sachin Chaturvedi
Annu Jalais
Priya Kanungo

Priya Kanungo, PhD Music, Delhi University 2005.She will be a artist in residence at Yale and will be offering a course in Spring, titled: Indian Music theory and Practice: From Slumdog Millionaire to Ravi Shankar

Vani Kulkarni

Vani Kulkarni, PhD Sociology, University of Pennsylvania 2007. She will be the Singh Fellow for Academic year 2009-2010. Her research interest and specialization lies at the intersection of development, health, democratic-decentralized governance system, culture, gender and social theory. Vani is offering the following courses: Health and Inequality in India and Public Health in India.

Marina Martin

Marina Martin, PhD History, London School of Economics 2009. Her dissertation title is, “An Economic History of Hundi, 1858-1978”. Marina is offering the following courses: Indian Merchants in South Asian History and History of India in Globalization.

Alessandro Monsutti

Alessandro Monsutti, PhD University of Neuchatel, 2002, is coming from Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland, where he is a Senior Lecturer. He was also Research Fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, 08-09. His research focuses on Afghanistan and Afghan transnational networks in Pakistan, Iran and Western countries. Alessandro is offering the following courses: State and Society in Afghanistan and Global Afghans.

Shreeyash Palshikar

Shreeyash Palshikar, PhD South Asian Languages and Civilazations, University of Chicago, 2007. He will continue as postdoctoral associate for the second year. He is offering the following courses: Violence in Modern South Asia and Democracy in Modern India.

2008-2009

Ashish Chadha
Charu Gupta
Shreeyash Palshikar
Gilles Tarabout