Faculty Appointments Expand the Study of South Asian History at Yale

With the creation of two new tenure-track positions in South Asian History, and the creation of a new visiting position at the senior level, the Department of History is significantly expanding its faculty expertise on South Asia. With this expansion, the Department will be able to develop new course offerings in the history of modern South Asia and attract graduate students who wish to study the region.  These appointments mark a significant effort to ensure that an expansive and rich tradition of scholarship on South Asian history within the discipline more broadly also finds representation at Yale.

A search concluded in Spring 2012 resulted in the appointment of two historians of South Asia at the rank of Assistant Professor.  Rohit De and Julia Stephens will both begin their appointments in June 2014.  Presently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge University, Dr. De completed his PhD at Princeton University and is trained both as a lawyer and as a historian of modern South Asia.  His research examines the ways through which law and legal institutions affect the everyday life of people. At Yale, he will teach courses on the history of South Asia, the making of contemporary India and Pakistan, Indian political thought, religion and the state, the Indian constitution among others, alongside comparative courses on law, colonialism and empire and methods in legal history.  Julia Stephens holds a PhD from Harvard University, and is presently a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge University.  Her current research focuses on the evolving relationship between colonial law and Islam from the late eighteenth to the mid twentieth century.  At Yale she will teach classes on South Asian history, Islam, colonial law, and the South Asian diaspora.

During Spring 2013, the acclaimed historian of women’s histories and social movements in colonial and post-colonial India, Tanika Sarkar, was at Yale as the inaugural Dhawan Visiting Professor of South Asian History.  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.  At Yale, she taught courses on SAST 223/HIST 352 “Reinventing Gender in Modern India” and SAST 326/ HIST 324J “Texts of Indian Modernity”.  Professor Sarkar remarked that she gained much from her students at Yale, who came at the history of South Asia with a fresh mind and enabled her to consider aspects of the region’s history that are often taken for granted within India.

In Spring 2014, the renowned historian of the social and cultural history of early modern India, Seema Alavi, will assume the position of Dhawan Visiting Professor in South Asian History.  Professor Alavi is based at Delhi University. Her research has examined the transitions in the military, medical and religious cultures in the period of transition to British rule.