Tarini Bedi is an urban and political anthropologist who conducts her research in India and Singapore. Her research areas are broadly concerned with the relationships between urbanization and globalization, and the accompanying shifts in politics, gender, economic livelihoods, and transport infrastructures in cities of the global South. She teaches courses on and advises students on topics related to urban anthropology, labor and work, gender and social movements, urban politics, and the anthropology of transport, infrastructure, and mobilities. She welcomes inquiries and applications from graduate students interested in these areas. Prospective students are encouraged to visit Professor Bedi’s detailed website or to contact Professor Bedi with questions.

Mark Liechty has been a student of Nepali history and society for almost three decades. His early work focused on the history and contemporary dynamics of class and social organization in Kathmandu and how these developments were related to trends in mass media, consumerism, and youth culture. This work is represented in his first three books: Suitably Modern (Princeton, 2003), Out Here in Kathmandu (Kathmandu, 2010), and The Global Middle Classes (edited with Rachel Heiman and Carla Freeman, Santa Fe, 2012). He recently published a major book on Western countercultural longing and the history of tourism entitled Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourism Encounter in Nepal (Chicago, 2017). Liechty is currently working on a research/book project on the cultural history of hydropower generation in Nepal that examines how different approaches to “development” have yielded dramatically different results in terms of “capacity building” and local economic impact.

Gayatri Reddy is a sociocultural anthropologist and her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of sexuality, gender, health, and the politics of subject and community-formation in India, as well as within the immigrant South Asian queer community in the U.S. Broadly, her work interrogates the contours of cultural belonging through the paradoxical dialectic of “alienation and intimacy.”

Katie Starkweather is a Biological and Biocultural Anthropologist working in Bangladesh who uses life history and developmental frameworks to study how ecology and behavior interact to influence health, nutritional, and reproductive outcomes in humans.

Aditi Aggarwal‘s research interests span urban anthropology, embodiment, gendered labour, and economic anthropology. She focuses on the ways in which labor is embodied, experienced, and performed, in gendered and mobile economies in Mumbai city.

Zoey is a cultural anthropology student, interested in medical anthropology, and focusing on the interface of queer/lgbtia communities and the mental health system in metropolitan cities in India. Her work draws on queer, feminist, post-colonial, and disability theory.

Shilpa Menon’s research interests include queer anthropology, queer cultures and networks, postcolonialisms and South Asia studies with a regional focus on south India.  She has worked with queer individuals and communities in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, and Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. She aims to continue her work in Kerala as a site of non-metropolitan and regional formations of non-normative sexual and gender identity and politics. Shilpa is also c0-editor of Ala (“wave” in Malayalam), a blog on Kerala studies.

Sarah’s research interests include the anthropology of cloth, identity, globalization, popular culture in Nepal.

Dipti is interested in the intersections of arts and anthropology, expressions and experiences. She looks at how the young generation make use of artistic expressions and mediums to display, perform, and curate their lived, cultural and political experiences. Her region of interest is South Asia, specifically, Nepal.

Themal is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies how gender-sexual discourses circulate in various economies – material, moral, sexual, relational – in Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan diaspora, and how negative space (e.g. inaction, absence, ambiguity) is produced and managed in such flows. He is particularly interested in working in the intersections of postcolonial studies and queer theory in order to explore how sexual subjects and subcultures conform to, contest, dilute, and are inflected by narratives of ethnicity, nationalism, transnational capital, and rural-local positions.

My research is based on the study of urban spaces and the intersections between “public” and “private” spaces produced through everyday performances of the self. I am specifically interested in how middle-class subjectivities are produced through idioms of masculinity within the context of Urban North India.

Dissertation Topic: From Interiority to Inner Territory: Tibetan Buddhism, Neuroscience and the Politics of Representation
Current Position: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Center for Healthy Minds at University of Wisconsin-Madison
In his dissertation he examined the continuing dialogue between Buddhists and Western scientists and how this encounter has helped shape contemplative research, Tibetan Buddhist monastic education, and the unfolding collaboration between them.  

Dissertation Topic:  Resilience and Adaptation of Trade Networks in East African and South Asian Port Polities, 1500-1800 C.E.
Current Position: Ford Family Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame

Dissertation Topic: Mobility, Cosmopolitanism, and the Productions of Place in Kathmandu: A Spatial Ethnography of Thamel

Department of Art and Art History

Department of History

Department of History and Department of English

Department of English

College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs

Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global Asian Studies

aiislanguageprograms.org

http://www.clscholarship.org/languages

http://salc.uchicago.edu

South Asia Summer Language Institute (SASLI) sasli.wisc.edu

American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) https://www.indiastudies.org/research-fellowship-programs/

Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies: http://anhs-himalaya.org/funding

American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies http://www.aisls.org/grants

American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) http://www.pakistanstudies-aips.org

American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS) http://www.aibs.net