Santiago García is a conservation scientist and policy expert with over 15 years of experience across Latin America, Africa, and the U.S. He is Director of Forests Partnerships at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), supporting forest governance and climate finance. Santiago previously served as Ecuador’s National Forestry Director and led national REDD+, restoration, and wildfire programs. He holds a PhD in Natural Resources from Cornell University and a Master’s in Conservation Leadership from Colorado State University.

Dr. Ronojoy Sen is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies and the South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. He has worked for over a decade with leading Indian newspapers, most recently as an editor for The Times of India.

Sadia Mahmood holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Arizona State University. Her research investigates religious difference and the production and governance of postcolonial minorities in South Asia. Grounded in fieldwork among Hindu communities in the Tharparkar region of Sindh and archival work in Pakistan and Bangladesh, her work examines the governance of minorities through legal and bureaucratic regimes in Pakistan, caste and identity politics along the Sindh-Rajasthan borderlands and Dalit strategies of assertion in Sindh. 

Nancy P. Lin is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies. She specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese art and architecture with a particular interest in the relationship between art and urbanism. Studying contemporary Chinese art through a transregional perspective, her current book project, Art On-Site: Situating Global Contemporaneity in 1990s China, examines locally situated, yet globally oriented site-based art practices in China during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Adhy Kim (he/they)* is an assistant professor in the Literatures in English Department and the Asian American Studies Program. His research is situated at the intersection of Asian and Asian American literary studies, with a focus on Korea, Japan, and their diasporas. Adhy’s book project, Speculative Natural Histories, examines the tightly connected and contested relationship between geopolitical realism and literary speculation in post-1945 Northeast Asian/American cultural production.

Yu Wang is a historian of sound, data, and technology, with a focus on the twentieth-century China. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto in 2019 and has taught there and the University of Macau before moving to Cornell.

Hyun-ho Joo’s research and teaching interests lie in modern Korean history from a comparative East Asian perspective, the history of Sino-Korean relations, cultural interactions between China and Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and modern Chinese and Korean intellectual history. Before he joined Cornell in 2024, he was a Professor at Yonsei University in South Korea. At Yonsei, he published two dozen academic articles and won the Outstanding Teaching Award twice (2012, 2014).

Drisana Misra is a scholar of the Japanese archipelago and its transregional connections with the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach to excavate traditionally obscured routes of transregional exchange, revealing the manifold ways in which Japanese and New World chroniclers, mapmakers, and artists participated in knowledge creation. She also studies Japanese literary and visual engagement with foreign realms, objects, and knowledges during the Edo Period (1603-1868).

Geographic Research Area: India

Teaching/Research Interest: Applied Economics & Policy, International Development, Economic Theory

Andrew Mertha is the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Director of the China Studies Program, and Director of the SAIS China Research Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). From 2019 to 2021, Mertha served as the Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation at SAIS. He is formerly a professor of Government at Cornell University and an assistant professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis.