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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.
 

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.
Associate Professor of Practice, Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences

Martin Gilbert is interested in pursuing health-related research that has direct relevance to the conservation of wildlife, particularly carnivores and scavengers. This includes approaches to understand how endangered species are impacted at a population level by infectious disease (such as

Senior Lecturer, Near Eastern Studies

Geographic Research Area: Iran and the Middle East

Teaching/Research Interests: Democracy in Modern Iran, Russo-Iranian relations, constitutional movements in the Middle East, Mongol rule in the Middle East

Professor Emeritus, South Asia Religions

Geographic Research Area: India

Teaching/Research Interests: South Asian religions, North Indian devotional traditions, and modern Indian religious movements

Graduate Student

Degree: PhD, Government

Language: Hindi

Research Interests: climate change, development, electoral politics, identity, migration, political economy.

Graduate Student

Raashid is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, where he studies early Islamic law and history.

Associate Professor, Fiber Science & Apparel Design

Denise Nicole Green is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design and Director of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection (CF+TC).

Professor Emeritus, Music

From 1980 until his retirement in 2011, Martin Hatch taught courses in music and musical traditions of Africa and Asia, elementary music theory, the history of American music, and ethnomusicology in Cornell University’s Department of Music and Department of Asian Studies.

Senior Lecturer, Asian Studies

Geographic Research Area: Sri Lanka

Teaching/Research Interests: Teaching Sinhala as a second language, English-Sinhala translation

Professor Emeritus, Government

Geographic Research Area: India

Teaching/Research Interests: Agrarian political economy and agrarian reform; ethnicity and conflict; political ecology and development; and social conflicts around science and genetic engineering