VISITING SCHOLARS

2008-2009

Ashish Chadha
Ashish Chadha is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Film Studies and South Asian Studies at Yale. He is trained as a social worker, archaeologist, filmmaker and an anthropologist with a PhD from Stanford University. His research centers on the relationship between science, state and bureaucracy in postcolonial India. He is currently working on a book emerging from his dissertation research called ‘Performing Science, Producing Nation: Archaeology and the State in Postcolonial India’. As a filmmaker his films have been shown in festivals throughout the world and he has recently finished his first feature length film, which had its world premier at the Locarno Film Festival in 2007.

email: ashish.chadha@yale.edu
more: www.avikunthak.com

Charu Gupta
Charu Gupta is a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale in South Asian Studies and History. She is an Associate Professor of History at a college in Delhi University. She did her PhD from SOAS, London. She has been a Rama Watamull Distinguished Indian Visiting Scholar at the University of Hawaii, a Visiting Faculty at the University of Washington, a Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, New York, an Asia Fellow of the Asian Scholarship Foundation, Thailand, a Visiting Fellow at the Wellcome Institute, London, and a South Asian Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her publications include the book Sexuality, Obscenity, Community and Contested Coastlines, and several articles on gender, sexuality, fundamentalism and nationalism in various national and international journals. Her present work is on Gendering Dalits in North India.

email: charu.gupta@yale.edu

David Mellins
David Mellins is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the South Asian Studies Council and the 2008-09 Singh Fellow of South Asian Studies at the MacMillan Center. He received his PhD in Sanskrit poetics at Columbia University in 2004 and has taught at Columbia, Rutgers and Seton Hall Universities. His research concentrates on the Indian rhetorical tradition during the early centuries of the second millennium and investigates the relationship between Indian aesthetic and semantic theory.

email: david.mellins@yale.edu
more: www.ling.yale.edu/faculty/mellins.html

Shreeyash Palshikar
Shreeyash Palshikar is a Post Doctoral Associate and Lecturer in South Asian Studies and Political Science. He has a BA from Amherst College and a PhD from The University of Chicago. His research interests include media, identity politics and state formation in modern South Asia. Currently, he is working on a book on vernacular propaganda in the Western India state of Maharashtra including the city of Bombay/Mumbai.

email: shreeyash.palshikar@yale.edu

Gilles Tarabout
Gilles Tarabout (Ph.D. 1986, EHESS, Paris), senior research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, is a social anthropologist who has published on various issues concerning society and culture in South Asia, such as conceptions of violence and non-violence, the acculturation of Christianity and Islam, spirit and divine possession, representations of the body, questions of iconography, transformations of rituals over time, conceptions of territory. He is currently engaged in a new international project on Governance and Justice in Contemporary India. One of his main concerns is to analyze changes in discourses, practices, and cultural categories, putting into evidence conflicting points of view within society that entail contrasted meanings and the dynamical reconfiguration of social relationships. He is visiting as senior lecturer at Yale for the second time and teaches two courses, “Popular Religion in India: Shifting Boundaries and Practices of Power”, and “Dealing with Misfortune in Contemporary India”.

email: gilles.tarabout@yale.edu