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People

Faculty

SAP has more than 50 core and affiliated faculty from across Cornell’s colleges and schools, working in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. SAP faculty and language instructors offer classes in Bengali, Hindi, Nepali, Pali, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sinhala, Tamil, Tibetan, and Urdu.

Steering Committee

The SAP steering committee provides internal faculty leadership from SAP's core faculty, collaborating with the director to set goals and priorities for SAP and to develop innovative programming and curricula related to South Asia.

Advisory Council 

The SAP advisory council is composed largely of persons based outside Cornell. With the aim of making our governance structure more global, the advisory council ensures that SAP fulfills its intellectual and educational mission in a rapidly changing international context. 

Visiting Scholars

SAP hosts visiting scholars from South Asia and elsewhere, including Fulbright fellows, our own South Asian Studies fellows, and other scholars, writers, and artists, who collaborate with Cornell faculty and students on South Asia Program activities.

Graduate Students

Students who minor in South Asian Studies work across Cornell's colleges and schools, in more than two dozen disciplines.

FLAS Fellows

SAP awards Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to outstanding students pursuing South Asian language and area studies. The U.S. Department of Education allocates these highly competitive four-year grants to SAP in recognition of our world-class language and area study program.

Staff

SAP staff have years of combined experience working in international studies, and they play an active role in enhancing the world's knowledge about South Asia.
 

Graduate Student

Praveen is a PhD student at the Department of Comparative Literature. His work focuses on modern South Asian literary and intellectual history (with an emphasis on 20th century Sri Lanka), psychoanalytic theory, Buddhist modernist thought, and postcolonial studies.

Professor, Historic Preservation Planning

Geographic Research Area: Asia, the Middle East, and Central and South America

Teaching/Research Interests: Relationships between museums and the public, and preservation, planning, and religion 

Associate Professor, History

Geographic Research Area: India and Pakistan

Teaching/Research Interests: British Empire, legacy of Indo-Persian politics in colonial era, history of political and economic ideas, and the history of global interconnections

Associate Director, Global Development

Terry Tucker is a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Global Development. He serves as Co-Director of Graduate Studies for the MPS – Global Development program. His teaching and outreach work focuses on smallholder agriculture, especially farmers' adaptation to change, as wel

Professor Emeritus, Government and International Agriculture

Geographic Research Area: India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Bhutan

Graduate Student

Palashi is a PhD student in the Information Sciences department at Cornell. Her research interests are located in technology policy, design and cultures. She works at the intersection of Information Science, Science and Technology Studies, and Anthropology.

Assistant Professor, Information Science
Aditya Vashistha's research focuses on creating social computing technologies that empower underserved communities worldwide.
FLAS Fellow

Degree: MPS, Global Development

Language: Hindi

Research interests: social-ecological systems, equitable conservation, and sustainable agriculture

Graduate Student

Darren Wan is a PhD student in the History Department. His research focuses on the ways South Chinese and South Indian migrant workers articulated claims to citizenship in the early postcolonial states of Burma and Malaya.

Degree Pursued: PhD

Professor, Linguistics

Geographic Research Area: South Asia

Teaching/Research Interests: Indo-European linguistics, especially the historical phonology and morphology of Greek, Latin and the Sabellic languages