South Asia at the New School
     South Asia Forum
 

Faculty

Arjun Appadurai
AppadurA@newschool.edu
www.appadurai.com
Arjun Appadurai serves as Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also holds a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences. Until recently, Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School. He was formerly the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, a Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center on Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit group of practically-oriented researchers concerned with urban global issues, based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India). He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles. His previous scholarly publications have covered such topics as religion, cuisine, agriculture and mass culture in India. He is one of the founding editors, along with Carol A. Breckenridge, of the journal Public Culture. He is the author of Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (1996, University of Minnesota Press; 1997, Oxford University Press, Delhi). His most recent book, entitled Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger appeared in the summer of 2006.

Lopamudra Banerjee
banerjeL@newschool.edu
Lopamudra Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Economics in The New School for Social Research. Her research interests include the economics of development, Inequality and Vulnerability, and the Political Economy of Disasters. Her most recent publication has been about disasters in Bangladesh entitled ‘Effects of Flood on Agricultural Wage formation in Bangladesh: An Empirical Analysis’, which appeared in the journal, World Development, in November 2007.

Carol A. Breckenridge
breckenc@newschool.edu
Carol A. Breckenridge is an Associate Professor in the Committee for Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research and the founder and former Director of the South Asia Forum. She earned her PhD from The University of Wisconsin and focused on religion and ritual in South India. She is one of the co-foundering editors of the journal, Public Culture. She is the editor of Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, and co-editor with Peter van der Veer of Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament.

Sumita Chakravarty
ChakravS@newschool.edu
Sumita Chakravarty (Ph.D. Communications) is chair of the Media and Cultural Studies concentration at Lang College, NSU and core faculty in the graduate Media Studies and Film program. She has taught extensively in the areas of media and cultural theory, film and television studies, third world cinema, globalization, and comparative media studies. Her current research projects include a cross-cultural study of visual technologies and social change in Egypt and India, a book on media's role in globalization, and the tentatively titled 'The Cultural Identity Mapping Project: Topologies of Media in/for the 21st Century.' She is the author of National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema (1993) and has edited a collection of essays on Indian filmmaker Mrinal Sen. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies.

Dilip da Cunha
dilip@design.upenn.edu
Architect and City planner. Faculty at Parsons School of Design, New York, and visiting faculty at University of Pennsylvania. Received his Ph. D from the University of California at Berkeley and Masters degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge and School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Principal in the practice, Mathur/ da Cunha and author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001) and Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2006).

Faisal Devji
devjif@newschool.edu
Faisal Devji teaches History at the New School. He has held faculty positions at Yale University and the University of Chicago, from where he also received his PhD in intellectual history. Devji was Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, and Head of Graduate Studies at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, from where he directed post-graduate courses in the Near East and Central Asia. He is interested in the political thought of modern Islam as well as in the transformation of liberal categories and democratic practice in South Asia. His broader concerns are with ethics and violence in a globalized world. Devji's book Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity appeared in the fall of 2005.

Vyjayanthi Rao
raov@newschool.edu
Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International affairs at The New School for Social Research.  She is also a Research Associate and a former Co-Director of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research), an interdisciplinary research laboratory based in Mumbai, India.  She received her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago and was a Post-Doctoral Associate at Yale University prior to joining The New School.
 
Her research focuses on globalization, development and cities and in particular, on issues concerning infrastructure, violence, memory and the cultural politics of modernity in contemporary and colonial South Asia.  Her ongoing research concerns the contemporary urban infrastructure of Mumbai and the impact of global processes upon Mumbai's urban futures.  She has published several articles based on this research in journals including Public Culture and Built Environment.   

Her dissertation research involved assessing the impact of a mega-dam project amongst displaced and marginalized communities in rural South India.  A book manuscript, based on this fieldwork, is in preparation, and it will also focus on an archaeological heritage conservation project undertaken as part of the mega-dam development thus attempting to reconcile the heritage of development with the development of heritage.      

In addition to her regular anthropology courses, she also collaboratively teaches courses focusing on the relationship between design and society.  She is the incoming Director of a Faculty Forum on South Asia and the Muslim World at The New School for the 07-08 Academic year.

Sanjay Ruparelia
RuparelS@newschool.edu   
Sanjay Ruparelia is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the Graduate Faculty and the Bachelor's Program at the New School. His areas of teaching include comparative politics, political economy of development and modern South Asia. His present research concerns transformations in contemporary Indian politics: economic liberalization, militant Hindu nationalism and the dynamics of power sharing amongst lower-caste, regional and communist parties in federal coalition politics. He is co-organizer of a collaborative interdisciplinary project, currently titled Understanding India's New Political Economy, which seeks to explain the linkages between these preceding transformations.

Anwar Shaikh
Shaikh@newschool.edu
Anwar Shaikh is a Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. His research interests include international comparisons of the welfare state and non-linear dynamic models of growth and cycles. He teaches on development economics, political economy, growth and cycle theory and the history of economic thought. His publications include, Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts, which he coauthored in 1994, and Globalization and the Myths of Free Trade in 1996.

Nidhi Srinivas
SrinivaN@newschool.edu
Nidhi Srinivas is Assistant Professor of Non-Profit Management at the New School of Management and Urban Policy, New York City. His research interests centre on civil society, specifically the management of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the transfer and transformation of management knowledge. He teaches courses in the areas of Non-profit management, International Development, and Strategic Decision-Making. Courses developed include ‘Managing institutions for development’ (part of the core curriculum in the Graduate Program in International Affairs) and ‘Civil Society and South Asia’. Classes seek to enhancing student ability to critique and integrate theories, and emphasize reflective readings and discussion. Dr. Srinivas worked previously as Lecturer in Strategic Management at the University of Essex, where he was the director of M.Sc. in Management Studies in 2000-2001 and taught courses in Strategic Management. He has also taught as a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, India. He was the external examiner for the MSc in Organizational Change and Development at the Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester from 2000-2003.

Nargis Virani
ViraniN@newschool.edu
Nargis Virani is Assistant Professor of Arabic at The New School, University Liberal Studies. She received her MA in 1991 and her PhD in 1999 in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University, and also holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in Education from London University and a Bachelor of Commerce from Bombay University. During the course of her Arabic Studies she studied at many prestigious institutions in the Muslim world such as the University of Jordan in Amman, the Bourguiba Institute in Tunis, and al-Azhar mosque in Cairo. At al-Azhar she studied the Qur'an with the Shaykh of al-Azhar and holds a shahadah (certificate) and an ijazah (permission to teach the Qur'an). Her areas of specialization are Arabic Language and Literature, Persian Language and Literature, Islamic Intellectual Thought, and Sufism. Her doctoral dissertation entitled 'I am the Nightingale of the Merciful Macaronic or Upside Down?' analyzed the Mulamma'at, the mixed-language poems, in Rumi's Diwan. In this work she proposes that 'speaking in many tongues' be looked at as a brilliant linguistic strategy employed by the mystic to fashion an imaginative form of apophatic discourse. She is currently converting her dissertation into a book which will also include a translation into English of all of Rumi's multilingual verses in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek, and Armenian. Dr Virani's second book project is tentatively entitled, 'Qur'an in Muslim Literary Memory'. She hopes to analyze the use of the Qur'an by a variety of 'litterateurs' from secular, religious, and mystical backgrounds.

Neguin Yavari
YavariN@newschool.edu
Neguin Yavari (Ph.D., Columbia, History Department, 1992) is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at The New School, University Liberal Studies.

Her biography of a medieval Persian vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, is forthcoming from Oneworld Press; and her most recent article,"Polysemous Texts and Reductionist Readings: Women and Heresy in the Siyar al-Muluk," has appeared in a collected volume of articles co-edited by her. On the politics of women's participation in new religious movements, she has an article forthcoming in an anthology compiled by the Muslim Communities of New York Project, sponsored by the Middle East Institute of Columbia University. Alongside research on the politics of religious activity among Muslim women, she has just completed an entry on the early history and ethnogenesis of the Saljuq Turks for the International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages, published by the Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, UCLA. Yavari is currently completing a major project on comparative biographies, mirrors for princes and the question of authority in the medieval period.