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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

Tanuj Chawla is a Tata-Cornell Scholar and a graduate student at the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Senior Lecturer, Asian Studies

Geographic Research Area: Bangladesh and India

Teaching/Research Interests: Teaching Bangla as a second language

Associate Professor, City and Regional Planning

Geographic Research Area: India, China, Ukraine, Fiji, and United States

Teaching/Research Interests: Historic cements, modernist architecture, cultural exchange, and sustainable development

International Professor Emeritus of Plant Breeding and Genetics

Geographic Research Area: South Asia

Teaching/Research Interests: Agricultural biotechnology, intellectual property, international agriculture, international development, and plant breeding and genetics

Graduate Student

Patrick is a PhD student in Asian literature, religion, and culture, who works as an intellectual historian of Sanskrit knowledge systems.

John H. Burris Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies

Geographic Research Area: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Middle East

Teaching/Research Interests: Modern and contemporary art, methodology and intellectual history, and film, media, and popular cultures

Graduate student

Neelanjan Datta is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at Cornell. His research is in Public Finance and Political Economy.

Graduate Student

Kaitlin holds a BA in art history from the University of California, Berkeley (2011) and an MA in Asian Studies from Cornell University (2017).

Retired Professor
Associate Professor, Epidemiology and Nutrition
Julia Finkelstein is the Follett Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow and associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition. She is a 2021–22 Global Public Voices fellow.