Faculty Updates 2015

Tej Bhatia’s “Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism  (Oxford 2013) was honored with the 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award; a revised paperback edition was released in 2014. Bhatia also gave a keynote address about “The Oldest Grammar of Hindi: Variational and Forensic Perspective” at the Workshop on Francois-Marie de Tours in Uppsala, Sweden in June.

Ann  Grodzins Gold is one of 178 scholars, artists, and scientists  who were awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Gold was also one of 41 scholars appointed a 2014-2015 fellow by the National Humanities Center (NHC). The NHC fellowship has enabled Gold  to take leave from their normal academic duties and pursue their research at the Center, which is located in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Currently in residence there, Gold is writing  a book tentatively titled Shiptown: North Indian Lives between Rural and Urban.

Issac Kfir had a number of publications on Afghanistan and Pakistan come out in 2014 including “Sectarian Violence in Pakistan” in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and “Trying to untangle the mystery of Afghanistan and Pakistan” in Millennium: Journal of International Studies.”

Prema Kurien is the inaugural recipient of the Asian and Asian American section of the American Sociological Association’s “Contribution to the Field Award.”

Chandra Mohanty has  joined the Advisory Committee of the Project on Armed Conflict Resolution and People’s Rights at the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership, Haas, UC-Berkeley.  The project is working on its first protocol on gendered and sexualized violence, and is writing up a report on civil society and conflict transformation in Punjab.   

Sudha Raj received the Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group (DPG) Leadership in Service Award and the Excellence in Practice Award from the Dietitians in Integrative and Functional Medicine DPG for her demonstrated commitment to the promotion of nutrition in integrative and functional medicine at the 2014 Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo (FNCE) held in Atlanta Oct. 18-21. 2014. 

Using mixed methods, Kamala Ramadoss collected data from 208 immigrants from the Indian sub-continent on their Transnational experiences.

In March, Romita Ray  published an article on Durga puja in Bengali cinema in a special issue of Religions devoted to the intersections between religion and the body. Contemporary photographer Laura McPhee’s photographs of Kolkata were complimented by Ray’s essay on the historic spaces and places of Calcutta in “A Tale of Two Cities: Calcutta/Kolkata,” for The Home and the World (Yale University Press, 2014). And        diamonds were the basis of "All that Glitters: Diamonds and Constructions of Nabobery in British Portraits (1600-1800).” The essay can be found in Julia Skelly’s edited volume The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600-2010 (Ashgate, 2014). Ray spent the summer in London on an NEH grant, rummaging in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the British library, in search of materials for her next book on the visual histories of tea consumption in India. 

Yuksel Sezgin is this year’s winner of  the American     Sociological Association’s Gordon Hirabyashi Human Rights Book  Award. Sezgin’s book, Human Rights Under State-Enforced  Religious Family Laws in Israel, Egypt, and India (Cambridge University Press, 2013), looks at how state-enforced family laws—under which a third of the world’s population lives—impact people’s fundamental  rights and liberties.  He has also been named the Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Center.

Farhana Sultana is a member of a team of collaborators, based out of University of British Columbia, Canada, who were awarded a $200,000 SSHRC Partnership Development Grant for the project “International      WaTERS Network (Water-related Training Education and Research in the global South).”

Cecilia Van Hollen received an AIIS Senior Short Term Research Fellowship for a four-month research project  on “Socio-cultural Perspectives and Responses to Cervical and Breast Cancer Screening and Treatment in Tamil Nadu, India” which she will begin in summer 2015 She also gave a number of lectures on her recently published book, Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India.

Joanne Waghorne was very busy in 2013-2014. She had chapters in three edited volumes. She was also able to travel to Singapore twice for research purposes. In July, she presented at the first AAS-in-Asia Conference in Singapore. She organized a panel titled “Religion Rising: The High-rise Building as Site for Religious/Spiritual Encounter.”