Faculty Appointments Expand South Asian Studies at Yale

After the launch of the Yale India Initiative in Fall 2008, with a focus on modern and contemporary India and South Asia, over the past three years, Yale’s expertise in South Asian Studies has grown substantially with new tenured and tenure-track faculty appointments across the humanities and social sciences.  Several of these appointments also advance the mission of the Yale India Initiative to promote the study and teaching of India and South Asia both in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and in the Professional Schools. A search for a Professor of Hinduism has been completed. And searches in South Asian History and South Asian Literature are getting underway. When these appointments are completed, in the coming months, a dozen new faculty would have joined Yale, since 2009, with expertise in India and South Asia.  Bringing scholarship that spans ethnic violence in post-independence India, Buddhist literary and religious culture in the Tibetan-Nepali borderlands, economic and monetary policy in India, and transnational identities in Nepal – to name but a few – these recent faculty appointments expand and enrich the study of South Asia at Yale.

 
Two recent appointments in the Department of Anthropology expand faculty expertise in the fields of medical anthropology and global health, and social anthropology, migration, and transnational identity formation in Himalayan South Asia. Catherine Panter-Brickis Professor of Anthropology with specialization in the critical analysis of health and wellbeing across key stages of human development, particularly childhood and adolescence, with special attention to the impact of poverty, disease, malnutrition, armed conflict, and social marginalization.  Her research in South Asia has focused on issues of violence and mental health in Afghanistan, and the social ecology of growth retardation in Nepali slums. Professor Panter-Brick is editor of several monographs, the most recent being Health, Risk and Adversity (Berghahn, 2009; co-edited with A. Fuentes), and is currently Senior Editor for the Journal Social Science and Medicine. Sara Shneiderman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology with expertise in the Himalayan regions of Nepal, India and China (particularly the Tibet Autonomous Region).Professor Shneiderman’s research addresses the relationships between political discourse, ritual practice, cultural performance and cross-border migration in producing contemporary ethnic identities, subjects on which she is widely published.  She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on ethnographic research that focuses on the cross-border circulation of Thangmi people in India, Nepal and China.  Exploring Thangmi ideas about ethnic, national, religious and political identity, this work offers a new explanation for the powerful persistence of ethnicity as a category of identification today despite the increasing realities of mobile, hybrid lives.

Shital Pravinchandra is Assistant Professor of English and a scholar of postcolonial theory and contemporary South Asian and Anglophone literature.  She is currently working on a book project, Inhuman Transactions?, based on her dissertation research which traces intersections between postcolonial studies and bioethics, exploring how contemporary Anglophone texts negotiate the complex ethical dilemmas posed by developments in human transplant technology.  Her future projects seek to extend postcolonial literary studies by examining two unexplored genres of writing: the short story, and 2) utopia and science-fiction.

In the Department of the History of Art, Assistant Professor Tamara Sears specializes in the study of the art and architectural history of the Indian subcontinent, with particular research interests in the relationships between political power, religion, and the production of sacred architecture. She has conducted extensive field research in the north and central Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and the results of her studies have been published in The Art Bulletin, South Asian Studies, and various edited collections. Professor Sears is currently completing a book, Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: The Architecture of Asceticism in Early Medieval India, which examines the connections between the emergence of the Hindu monastery as a new architectural type, the regionalization and localization of royal power, and the institutionalization of new forms of ritual practice from the eighth through twelfth centuries.

A Senior Fellow in the Jackson Institute and Professor in the Practice of International Economics and Finance in the Yale School of Management, Rakesh Mohan holds expertise in the areas of economic reforms and liberalization, industrial economics, urban economics, infrastructure studies, economic regulation, monetary policy, and the financial sector.  Prior to his appointment at Yale, Professor Mohan served as deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India where he was in charge of monetary policy, financial markets, economic research and statistics.  With well-honed experience as both a practioner and academic, Professor Mohan’s most recent publications include: Growth With Stability: Central Banking in an Emerging Market Economy(Oxford, forthcoming), The Indian Economy: Performance and Prospects, (Oxford, 2010; with S. Acharya, ed.), and Monetary Policy in a Globalized Economy: A Practitioner’s View (Oxford 2009).

Recent appointments in the Department of Political Science extend the Department’s strength in the field of comparative politics through the addition of two faculty members specializing in the politics and government of India. Steven Wilkinson, Nilekani Professor of Indian and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, joined Yale in the summer of 2009 from the University of Chicago, where he was Chair of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. He has worked on communal violence, and a book on this topic, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge, 2004) won the top book award from the American Political Science Association in 2006. He has also been interested in political corruption, and has authored a recent edited volume on that topic with Herbert Kitschelt Patrons, Clients and Policies (Cambridge, 2007). At Yale, as well as participating in South Asia initiatives, such as the India Parliamentary Leadership program and the first Shimla Retreat in June 2011, he continues to work on ethnic violence. He has recently completed research for a co-authored project with Saumitra Jha (Stanford) that is the first to quantitatively analyze patterns of partition violence and ethnic cleansing in India from 1947-51. They find especially large ethnic cleansing effects in areas with larger number of returned soldiers who had fought for the Indian Army on the frontline in World War II. Wilkinson is also writing a comparative book on colonial legacies, which explains why some ex-colonies, like India, have had much better democratic and conflict outcomes than others.  Tariq Thachil is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the South Asian Studies Major.  His research focuses on party-voter linkages, social movements, and ethnic politics in South Asia, and has been published in World Politics, Comparative Politics, and Contemporary South Asia.  His dissertation examines how religious nationalists in India use social services to expand their electoral base among the poor, and was awarded the 2010 Gabriel A. Almond Award for best dissertation in comparative politics by the American Political Science Association, and the 2010 Sardar Patel Prize for best dissertation on modern India in the humanities and social sciences.

In the Department of Religious Studies, Assistant Professor Andrew Quintman specializes in the Buddhist traditions of Tibet and the Himalaya. His recent book, The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa, explores the extensive body of early literature recording the life of Tibet’s acclaimed eleventh-century yogin and poet Milarepa. Professor Quintman also recently completed a new critical study and English translation of the Life of Milarepa (Penguin Classics, 2010). He is currently working on a project to document the life of the Buddha based on an archive of seventeenth-century visual and literary materials from the renowned Jonang Monastery in Western Tibet. While on leave during the coming academic year, he will be starting research for a new book on Buddhist religious and literary culture in the borderlands of Tibet and Nepal.

Professor Inderpal Grewal, holds an appointment in the Program on Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with secondary appointments in American Studies and Anthropology.  Professor Grewal’s current works in progress include a book-length monograph, titled The Gender of Security, on relations among security formations, the state, gender, and feminisms in contemporary India and the United States.  Widely published, Professor Grewal is co-editor and contributing author to the field-shaping 1994 volume, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press; with Caren Kaplan), which was responsible for inaugurating the new field of transnational feminist cultural studies, a focus she has pursued and refined in her most recent book, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke University Press; 2005).