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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, English

Geographic Research Area: India

Teaching/Research Interests: Critical theory, 20th-century literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, and modernism and postmodernism

Associate Professor, Anthropology and Asian American Studies

Viranjini Munasinghe's research interests focus on nationalism, race and ethnicity, creolization and indigeneity, Asian American Studies, South Asian Diaspora, Labor and Political Economy of Plantation Societies, Historical Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Comparison, Postcolonial Theory.

Advisory Council Member

Rohan Murty is a technology entrepreneur. He holds a PhD in computer science from Harvard and a BS from Cornell. His dissertation work on white spaces networking was seminal in opening up a new area of research.

Graduate Student

Malavika Narayan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her research is based in Delhi and focuses on the emergence, evolution and persistence of particular geographies of urban informal work.

Professor, Linguistics and Classics

Geographic Research Area: South Asia

Teaching/Research Interests: Indo-European linguistics, and Greek and Latin comparative and historical linguistics

FLAS Fellow

Degree: PHD, Science & Technology Studies

Language: Sinhala

Research interests: queer institutional ecologies; social life of natural history; science and storytelling; notions of objectivity, the body, and the world.

Graduate Student

Vishal is interested in protected areas, traditional knowledge and the relations that make these categories possible in contemporary South Asia. They have previously received a BA in Anthropology from The George Washington University.

Outreach Manager
Director, Southeast Asia Program
Thomas Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
Associate Dean and Associate Professor, Art, Architecture, and Planning

Geographic Research Area: India, Nepal, China, and United States

Teaching/Research Interests: Observation and interpretation, multimedia art, and science and art