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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.
 

Professor, Applied Economics and Management

Geographic Research Area: India

Teaching/Research Interests: Development economics, field experiments, information economics, international trade, and labor economics

Director, South Asia Program
Sarah Besky is Professor of the Anthropology of Work in the Department of Global Labor & Work at the ILR School. Her research explores the intersection of inequality, nature, and capitalism in the Himalayas.
Graduate Student

Isha is a MS/PhD student in the Department of Global Development. Her research interests include the study of gender, as a system of knowledge and as practice, specifically in relation to patterns of fertility and the family, with a regional focus on India.

Graduate Student

Rohil holds a bachelor's degree in engineering and biotechnology. He completed his master’s degree in food science from Cornell.

Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Asian Studies

Anne M. Blackburn the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities of South Asia studies and Buddhist studies in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. She received her BA from Swarthmore College and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago.

Associate Professor, Asian Studies

Daniel Boucher's research focus is Buddhist studies, particularly the early development of the cluster of Indian Buddhist movements called the Mahayana and their transmission to China in the first few centuries of the Common Era.

Graduate Student
Degree: PhD, City and Regional Planning Language: Malayalam Research Interests: Environment & migration, displacement & dispossession, land governance & human rights, managed retreat, reconciling rural livelihoods & biodiversity conservation, and mountain peoples & ecosystems
Sidney Kaufman Professor in Geophysics

Geographic Research Area: Nepal, Tibet, China

Teaching/Research Interests: Geophysics, seismology, ground-penetrating radar, and geotectonics
 

Graduate Student

Vincent is a PhD candidate in the Asian Religions doctoral program of the Department of Asian Studies. He has received a 2016-17 Fulbright Student Fellowship to conduct his research over the next year in India.

Associate Professor, Government

Allen R. Carlson is an associate professor of government. He earned his PhD from Yale University’s Department of Political Science. His undergraduate degree is from Colby College.