Bernard Bate, Associate Professor in Anthropology (PhD University of Chicago, 2000). 

I focus on Tamil South Asia, language, politics, gender and the historical ethnography of language.  My first book, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic (Columbia University Press, due 2009), examines political and literary oratory in the contexts of its production in Madurai, Tamilnadu. 

My current project explores the emergence of Tamil oratory – from the Protestant sermon to political speeches – and its relationship to the production of a Tamil public sphere.  I teach a variety of courses in the anthropology of language and in south Asian area studies focusing on gender, politics, media, semeiotic and phenomenology including ‘Language and the Public Sphere,’ ‘Poetics and Performance,’ 'Oratory and Rhetoric,' ‘Gender/Media/India,’ 'Language and Gender in Cultural Anthropology,' and ‘South Asian Nationalisms,'