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.”