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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yousuf's research agenda focuses broadly on climate change adaptation, forest resource management, conservation, and institutional mechanisms for climate policy formulation.
Teaching/Research Interests: Sustainable economic development, intertemporal decentralization, dynamical systems, and allocation theory and international trade theory
Aparajita Majumdar is a PhD candidate in history. Her research brings together ideas concerning matter, space, and ecology in the histories of resource extraction. She works primarily on the accumulation of "wild" rubber in the northeastern tracts of British India.
Ayesha Matthan is a PhD student in the department of History of Art and Visual Studies. She is interested in photojournalistic practices, popular visual culture and politics in the Indian subcontinent from the 19th century to the present day.
