Alumni and Student Updates

Four of our alumni received tenure during 2010: Chaise LaDousa at Hamilton College, Clinton NY; Lisa Knight at Furman University, Greenville, SC; Yamuna Sangarasivam at Nazareth, and Kalyani Menon at DePaul University, Chicago IL.

Several of our students successfully defended their dissertations in the past year: Vivek Srinivasan (Social Science), Mary Lou Fernandes (Social Science), Bandita Sijapati (Social Science), Asha Sundaram (Economics). Vivek has been named the Program manager for the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford University. Since defending, Mary Lou has taught Public Policy at the American University in Kosovo, and she now contributes opinion pieces on Indian policy issues at Huffington Post, consults with the World Bank and runs a high-end consultancy matching service called worldXperts. Asha is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of South Africa. She is also a co-author of a chapter in a new volume on Poverty in India—“Do Lagging Regions Benefit from Trade?” (with Pravin Krishna and Devashish Mitra). The Poor Half Billion in South Asia: What is Holding Back Lagging Regions, E. Ghani (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2010.

Two of our Ph.D. students received grants to conduct their dissertation research. Faris Khan (Anthropology) received the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant for his project, “Exploring Queer Disjunctures: Sexual Subjects and Activist Groups in Kolkata”. He is currently in Pakistan doing research. Madhura Lohokare, PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department, has received the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Lohokare's project will examine the ways in which the urban poor use public spaces in Pune, Maharashtra and the extent to which their use of space can lead to political mobilization.

John Giammatteo, a dual anthropology and magazine journalism major in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, respectively, and a South Asian Studies Minor, has received a Marshall Scholarship, the first in the history of Syracuse University. He plans to plans to pursue a master’s degrees in global migration at the City University of London, and in Southeast Asia studies at the University of London’s School for Oriental and African Studies. When he returns to the United States, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology with a focus on forced migration.