PhD Graduates Launch Careers Across the Globe

This summer, graduating doctoral students working in the South Asian region will leave Yale’s campus to begin careers at leading colleges and universities across North America, Europe, and Oceania.

From the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Jennifer Baka will take up a position as Lecturer in Geography and Environment. Jennifer’s dissertation used the framework of industrial and political ecology to critically examine the concept of ‘wastelands’ as it relates to India’s biofuel program.

Human-environment relations are also at the center of two dissertations produced in the Department of Anthropology. Radhika Govindrajan and Shaila Seshia Galvin both pursued research in Uttarakhand, with Radhika examining the ways in which humans and animals shape each other in the state’s forest-edge villages while Shaila explored the promises and perils of commercial organic agriculture among the region’s smallholder farmers. This summer, Radhika will begin a position as Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Shaila will start a two-year Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College.

Several graduates from the Department of Political Science, with research ranging from Maoist insurgency to questions of political order and patronage, will take up faculty and postdoctoral positions at institutions spanning three continents. Uday Chandra begins a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity; Shivaji Mukherjee assumes the position of Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto; and Paul Kenny joins the Australian National University as a Research Fellow in Indian Political and Social Change in the School of International, Political, and Strategic Studies.

From the Department of Religious Studies, Marko Geslani, who completed his dissertation on early Hindu ritual texts, will begin an appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Emory University in the fall of 2013.