New Visiting Scholars Direct Focus on South Asia

The South Asian Studies Council welcomes a number of established and emerging scholars this year, who will hold semester or year-long positions on Yale’s campus.  With diverse research interests, they enrich the academic and intellectual life of South Asian Studies at Yale through exciting new course offerings, talks and lectures, and as participants in the Council’s colloquia, workshops, and conferences.

Within the Council, Dipti Khera is appointed as Postdoctoral Fellow and Shailaja Paik as the Doctor Malathy Singh Visiting Lecturer for 2012-2013. Dipti is trained in Art History, Museum Anthropology, and Architecture. She expects to receive her PhD in Art History from Columbia University, and her dissertation is titled “Picturing India’s “Land of Princes” Between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and its Environs”.  Building on this research, she is offering two courses at Yale: Cross-Cultural Encounters in South Asian Art and History (Fall 2012) and Visualizing Place, Landscape and Travel in South Asia (Spring 2013). Shailaja Paik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati, and received her PhD from Warwick University, in the United Kingdom.  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.  Her course offerings are: Modern Indian History (Fall 2012) and India on Film (Spring 2013). 

Joining these rising scholars in the Council are two renowned scholars of South Asia, Christophe Jaffrelot who holds an appointment as Research Scholar in South Asian Studies for Fall 2012, and Tanika Sarkar, the Dhawan Visiting Professor of South Asian History who will be in residence at Yale in Spring 2013. Christophe Jaffrelot is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Research, in Paris, France, and 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 Developmen (Political Science 461) with colleagues in Yale’s Department of Political Science. Tanika Sarkar is an acclaimed historian of women’s histories and social movements in colonial and post-colonial India and is Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. 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 contemporaryright-wing Hindu movements in India.

The Council is fortunate to benefit from the presence of several visitors within the wider Yale community. Jennifer Bussell, Assistant Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, joins the Department of Political Science at Yale as Visiting Assistant Professor of South Asian Politics. Her recent 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.  During the Fall 2012 semester she is teaching a seminar for undergraduate and graduate students titled The Political Economy of Natural Disasters, with emphasis on natural disasters in South Asia.

Ashok Acharya, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Joint Director, Developing Countries Research Centre at the University of Delhi, comes to Yaleas the Rice Visiting Lecturer in Global Justice and South Asian Studies.  He is author of the forthcoming volume Equality, Difference and Group Rights: The Case of India and his research interests encompass contemporary and comparative political theory, liberalism, affirmative action, equal opportunity, citizenship, rights, multiculturalism, and ethics and public policy. Janam Mukherjee is a Program Fellow in Agrarian Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in the History and Anthropology Program in 2011, and will spend his fellowship year revising his dissertation, titled “Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire 1939-1946”, for publication.

In addition to these newly appointed visiting scholars, the Council welcomes the continuation of the tenure of several visitors from last year. Rasika Khanna will be a Visiting Fellow with the South Asian Studies Council for the Fall 2012 academic year. Sadia Saeed continues her appointment as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow.  And ethnomusicologist Stan Scott will be in residence at Yale in Spring 2013, when he will teach the course Indian Musical Traditions.