DIRECTOR'S LETTER
By Sarah Besky, Professor of the Anthropology of Work, ILR School, and Binenkorb Director, South Asia Program
As I enter my third year as Director of the South Asia Program at Cornell, it has been a pleasure to take time to reflect on the work of the program over the past year and think about exciting things to come.
We hosted 23 talks over the 2024-2025 academic year in our Monday SAP seminar series. We will continue our weekly seminar this year. Please join us at 12:15 in G08 Uris Hall.
One additional highlight from the previous year is that we hosted award-winning journalist P. Sainath for a week-long residency thanks to the support of the Lund Practitioner-in-Residence fund. He gave talks in both the South Asia Program and the City and Regional Planning seminars on campus that highlighted stories and work from his journalistic career and his two books: Everyone Loves and Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts and The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom. Sainath also gave an engaging and interactive talk on journalism in India at the Soil Factory in Ithaca, which was co-hosted by Story House Ithaca. I am pleased to say that Sainath will be returning to Ithaca next academic year, when he will begin his tenure as A.D. White Professor at Large.
This year’s 15th annual Tagore Lecture in Modern Indian Literature will be given by Booker-prize-winning translator and author Daisy Rockwell. Rockwell will speak on September 19 at 4:30 in A.D. White House on “Mixed Metaphors: Adventures in Translationland.” If you are in Ithaca, please join us! While Rockwell is on campus, she will also run additional workshops for graduate students on translation.
These are difficult times for international studies in higher education. But now more than ever, it is important to think and work across difference, and to decenter hegemonic ways of knowing. The kind of thoughtful, meticulous, and critical scholarship we support, promote, and highlight at the South Asia Program—in our seminars and amongst our amazing faculty and students—is important. I think that this is critical to emphasize right now. Area studies scholarship is important. Full stop. It matters. It matters because nuance matters. Social life matters. History matters.
Since 1985, SAP has been funded by a Department of Education National Resource Center grant. And since that year, we have been able to fund hundreds of students through Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships to learn South Asian languages—some of which are only taught at Cornell. This funding is now in jeopardy. Without it, we will need to collectively think about new strategies for supporting the distinctive South Asian Studies curriculum that is only available at Cornell and includes intensive semester-long language instruction in 11 languages: Nepali, Sinhala, Bangla, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan.
As always, it is important to recognize the amazing work of Daniel Bass and Gloria Lemus-Chavez, without whom there would be no South Asia Program. Please be in touch and check back on the SAP website for new updates on talks, workshops, and other opportunities for faculty and students interested in the region. If you would like to learn more about how to get involved with the program, please reach out to us at sap@cornell.edu, or stop by the South Asia suite in 130 Uris Hall.
Cornell, My Once and Future Home
Poem by SAP Visiting Scholar Abdul Haque Chang
for the gorges, the givers, and the silence that made me whole
Summer 2025 Ashoka University Internship
by Aharnish Dev
When I first stepped onto Ashoka University’s campus in Sonipat, Haryana, the summer heat carried with it the weight of the challenge ahead. I had never been to India, never worked in an international lab, and never imagined I would spend weeks of long hours studying the flight performance of fruit flies. But that is exactly where I found myself, in the Integrative Genetics and Evolution Laboratory (IGEL) led by Dr. Sudipta Tung, investigating how diet influences neuromuscular aging in Drosophila melanogaster.
The project centered on the flight assay, a tool for measuring how high a fly can land after being released into a vertical column. I focused on flies raised on diets with varying protein-to-carbohydrate (P:C) ratios, tracking changes in their landing heights over 32 days. Each run required meticulous preparation: maintaining age-matched populations, collecting flies without damaging their wings, photographing the traps, and later analyzing every landing position. Slowly, the numbers told a story. High P:C ratio diets led to faster declines in flight ability, while more balanced ratios preserved performance for longer. I soon began to see how diet shaped neuromuscular decline in ways that were both statistically rigorous and biologically compelling.
The beauty of the lab also came from the fact that we were all involved in one another’s projects. One day I was helping with pupa sexing to separate males and females, and another day I would stay for a night shift to record data on the rates of starvation within the fruit flies. One day would have food changes for the fruit flies while another would be centered on studying their negative geotaxis.
But research was not my only classroom. Delhi itself became a living syllabus in adaptation and discovery. On days when experiments ended early, I went into the city, losing myself in the chaos of Chandni Chowk, weaving between spice stalls heavy with cardamom and chili, or bargaining for handicrafts at Dilli Haat or clothes at Sarojini Nagar. Every trip was an exercise in observation, not unlike fieldwork: noticing how conversations shifted between Hindi and English, how food vendors organized their workflows, how crowds moved with an unspoken rhythm. Before too long, I even picked up a surprising amount of Hindi!
The most lasting lessons, though, came from the people around me. Friends in the lab invited me to basketball games after long experimental shifts. I’d take in their food recommendations, and we’d debate geopolitics over chai. Traveling together on weekends, we navigated train stations, language barriers, and unpredictable weather. Slowly the places that initially seemed so daunting felt as recognizable as the back of my hand.
After the end of my internship, when I boarded my return flight, I carried home more than data and graphs. I brought back an understanding of what it means to do science as part of a truly global community, the confidence to work across cultural and disciplinary boundaries, and the memory of a summer where the challenge I feared most became the one I valued most.
They Fled Afghanistan Together—and Now They’re Graduating
by Melissa Newcomb
After escaping the Taliban, nine women matriculated at Cornell in November 2021, and the first to complete their degrees graduated in May 2025
It took days, immense bravery, and several loops around the airport by bus as gunfire erupted around them for the group of young women to escape Afghanistan when the Taliban took over in August 2021
Through Global Cornell’s “scholars under threat” initiative, Cornell offered extensive support to help them get acclimated and to succeed, including financial aid, specialized orientation sessions and tours, donated laptops, and care packages, as well as cultural training for Cornell staff, for which the South Asia Program assisted
For more than 60 years, Diwali celebration brings light to campus
By Caitlin Hayes
As the days get shorter and the clocks turn back, the student group Society for India is bringing light to campus with Diya Jale – the longest-standing campus celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, in North America.
“Everyone comes together, everyone celebrates, and the Society for India wants to bring that spirit and that light into everyone’s day before daylight savings ends.”
“In India, there are a lot of states, languages, religions, but every single person I know celebrates Diwali,” said Anoosha Mallakanti ’26, an operations research and engineering major in Cornell Engineering, international student and events co-chair for the Society for India. “Everyone comes together, everyone celebrates, and the Society for India wants to bring that spirit and that light into everyone’s day before daylight savings ends.”
“This will be my first Diwali away from home, and it’s a little sad because the holiday really means family to me... These types of events have the power to create a place that makes you feel at home.”
The celebration has been held for more than 60 years – the Cornell Daily Sun first mentioned it in 1959. At that time, it was hosted by the newly formed India Association and included traditional songs, dances, an exhibition of Indian saris, crafts and arts, the lighting of candles and even a mock wedding – Ratan Tata ’59, B.Arch ’62, who would go on to become the university’s most generous international benefactor and an advocate for Cornell’s connection to India, played the groom.
NEWS
- Journalist P. Sainath visits Cornell
- Daisy Rockwell Fall 2025 Tagore Lecture
- Cornell Nepal Fulbright Students
- Sinhala Textbooks Open Access
- Global AI Among Three Projects Funded to Build a Better Future
- Music Professor Ariana Kim’s Sabbatical in India on PBS NewHour
- SAP Manager Daniel Bass Interviewed on BBC News
Journalist P. Sainath visits Cornell
Award-winning journalist and social activist P. (Palagummi) Sainath visited Cornell in September 2024 as a Lund Practitioner-in-Residence at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. He will return to campus in 2026 and future years as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large.
Sainath has devoted his career to justice, equity, and inclusion. Based in Mumbai, India, he is the founder and editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), an independent multimedia digital platform that brings the stories of rural people and everyday life to bear on contemporary Indian politics. Sainath’s prize-winning best-seller, Everybody Loves a Good Drought (1996), explores rural lives in India. It became a Penguin Publishing classic in 2012.
As an investigative reporter, teacher, and advocate for rural issues, Sainath has won more than 60 national and international reporting awards and fellowships, including the Fukuoka Grand Prize (2021), World Media Summit award (2014), and Amnesty International’s Inaugural Global Human Rights Reporting Prize (2000).
Sainath has taught journalism at Sophia Polytechnic in Mumbai for over 20 years and has held appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Sainath received a B.A. from Loyola College in Madras (1977) and an M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (1979).
While at Cornell in September, he met with students and faculty and made several presentations, including The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom - Who, Really, Were India’s Anti-colonial Raj Fighters? as part of the SAP seminar series, Freedom of the Purse at the weekly Becker House café, and Migrants and the Moral Economy of the Urban Elite at the Department of City and Regional Planning. He also made one presentation for the wider Ithaca community, on Journalism, Writing, and Inequality at The Soil Factory, cosponsored by Story House Ithaca.
Daisy Rockwell
Fall 2025 Tagore Lecture
On Friday, September 19, 2025, Daisy Rockwell will deliver the 15th Annual Tagore Lecture, Mixed Metaphors: Adventures in Translationland. Translators love to use metaphors to capture the nature of their work, yet every metaphor seems to fall short, resulting in a great, unusable tangle of mixed metaphors. In this lecture, Daisy Rockwell will share some of her own handcrafted metaphors for translation and explore the many dimensions of the art.
Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. She has translated numerous classic and contemporary literary works from Hindi and Urdu into English. Her translations have been awarded the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work, the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, and the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award. Her translations have been honored with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and PEN Translates. Her novel Alice Sees Ghosts, and Mixed Metaphors, her collection of poems about translation, are both forthcoming from Bloomsbury India in 2025 and 2026. Her memoir Our Friend, Art is forthcoming from Pushkin Press in 2027.
The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature is made possible by a gift from the late Cornell Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from across South Asia and its diasporas.
Cornell Nepal Fulbright Students
Image above: Ashira Weinreich (in blue), Mika Ulmet (in black), Elizabeth Taber (in black & red), with three other Fulbright students
- Madeleine August presented “On Generosity and Refuge: Sri Lankan Ambalamas.”
- Elizabeth Taber spoke on “Waste Management Policy in Small-scale Nepali Cities.”
- Mika Ulmet presented “The Future of Finger Millets in Nepal: Perspectives on its Production, Consumption, and Culinary Uses in the Household.”
- Ashira Weinreich’s paper was “Medicinal Plant Use and Health Sovereignty in the Himalayan Mountains of Manaslu Conservation Area, Nepal."
Sinhala Textbooks Now Open Access
SAP has been the world's leading publisher of Sinhala language textbooks, with books for colloquial and literary, beginning and intermediate language learners, for many decades.
In December 2024, we made six of our Sinhala textbooks, written by James W. Gair, W. S. Karunatilaka, and others, published in the 20th century, as well as the accompanying audio files, freely available under Open Access. Our more recently published Sinhala textbooks are still available only in print editions.
Global AI among three projects funded to build better future
by Olivia M. Hall
A multidisciplinary team led by Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, aims to build a more inclusive AI shaped by global cultures and knowledge – one of three projects that make up Cornell’s new Global Grand Challenge: The Future.
“We want to realize a future where AI benefits the other 85% of the world’s population in the Global South – including frontline health care workers, low-resource teachers, disabled people – just as much as it does the privileged in the West”
“I think about this issue a lot in my work, which centers on how you design, build, and evaluate AI and other digital technologies for underserved communities in a global setting,” Vashistha said. Vashistha believes that AI has transformative potential to meet big social challenges. But up to now, he said, “AI technologies have primarily represented and benefited people in the West – where they are designed – while perpetuating harmful stereotypes about non-Western cultures and marginalized groups.”
Bangladesh Now:
Behind the Headlines webinar
From the beginning of the student-led quota reform movement on June 6, 2024, across the creation of an interim government upon the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on August 5, a lot happened in Bangladesh in a short period of time. A virtual panel organized by the Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium on September 5, 2024, brought together scholars in New York and activists in Bangladesh to help add personal texture and academic analysis to the headlines and provide an opportunity for questions and discussion. Participants in this virtual roundtable, moderated by Mona Bhan, Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies & Director, South Asia Center, Syracuse University, included:
- Farhana Sultana - Professor, Geography, Syracuse University
- Dina M. Siddiqi - Clinical Professor, Global Liberal Studies, New York University
- Muhib Rahman - Postdoctoral Associate, Government, Cornell University
- Kazi Farzana Shoily - Ph.D. Candidate, History, Syracuse University
- Tasnuva Helal Bidita - Student and Human Rights & Climate Activist, Bangladesh
- Ammar Bin Asad - Student, Photographer, and Activist, Jagannath University, Bangladesh
Fourth Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium Graduate Student Symposium
On Friday, February 28, SAP Manager Daniel Bass drove a vanload of Cornell graduate students to Syracuse University, to participate in the fourth Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium Graduate Student Symposium, supported by our most recent National Resource Center grant from the U. S. Department of Education, entitled “Alternative Methodologies and the Future of Research in South Asia: Destabilizing Monolithic Imaginaries and Problematic Practices.” Held in the well-apportioned Milton Room in the Whitman School of Management, thirteen graduate students from Cornell, Syracuse, and Rochester made short presentations on their research, focused as much on unanswered questions as firm conclusions.
This format allowed for peer support and mentorship for students in various stages of their research process through dialogue and conversation. One of the symposium’s goals was to create spaces for co-laboring through the messiness and untangling (or sitting with the tangles) students’ research concerns together.
Sri Lanka in Context Graduate Student Conference
SAP hosted the 2025 Sri Lanka Graduate Conference, Sri Lanka in Context: Critical Perspectives, May 2-3, cosponsored by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. As was the case in previous years, the conference consisted of a Friday morning closed-door workshop, Friday evening public arts event, Saturday presentations, and ample time for networking and cohort-building.
The closed Dissertation Development Workshop on the morning of Friday, May 2, had five participating students and three faculty mentors: Nilan Jayasena (English, Miami University), Elizabeth Bittel (Sociology, SUNY-Cortland), and Daniel Bass (Anthropology, Cornell University).
In the first panel, Ifadha Sifar (History, Columbia University) presented “‘These drifting Somalis’: Migration and Identity Formation in the Talaimannar-Djibouti circuit, 1919–1946” and Sanayi Marcelline (History, University of Leiden) presented “Tangible and Intangible Freedom: Manumission and Emancipation in the late 18th and early 19th century Colombo.” Durba Ghosh, Taylor Family Director, Cornell Society for the Humanities, and Professor of History, Cornell University, served as the discussant.
In the second panel, Themal Ellawala (Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago) presented “On Absences and Presences: A Speculative Reading of Disappearance under Liberal Modernity” and F. Zahrah Rizwan (Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Ohio State University) presented “Hustling Through A Pandemic: The Implications of COVID-19 on Sex Work in Urban Sri Lanka.” Lucinda E. G. Ramberg, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Cornell University, served as the discussant.
In the third panel, Deborah Philip (Anthropology, City University of New York) presented “What Remains? Genealogy, Language, and the Politics of Un/belonging” and Praveen Tilakaratne (Comparative Literature, Cornell University) presented “The Black Legend in/of Ceylon: Kaffrinha, Créolité, and Imperial Difference between the 19th Century and the Present.” Hadia Akhtar Khan, Post-doctoral Associate in the Future of Work, School of Industrial and Labor Relations Cornell University, was the discussant.
As part of the conference, we screened Paradise, a 2023 Sri Lankan-Indian co-produced film co-written and directed by Prasanna Vithanage, on Friday evening. Nalin Jayasena (English, Miami University) introduced the film and led a Q&A afterwards. The public conference presentations on Saturday, May 3, were excellent, with ample time for discussion among panelists, the audience, and the Cornell faculty discussants.
South Asian New Year Celebration
On Saturday, April 19, 2025, SAP held our first South Asian New Year Celebration, cosponsored by the Language Resource Center and the Department of Asian Studies. Organized by Senior Lecturer of Bengali, Razima Chowdhury, this event highlighted the rich languages and traditions associated with the New Year. The event served as an opportunity for students of all backgrounds to engage through music, dance, food, and language-focused activities featuring the diverse ways the New Year is celebrated across South Asia.
After gathering in the Klarman Hall atrium for food, crafts, games, and conversation, everyone moved to the Klarman Auditorium for performances of classical and modern dance, Tagore Sangeet, and more.
East Marries West concert
On October 4, 2024, Cornell Saarang (SPICMACAY at Cornell) hosted “East Marries West,” a concert by Shubhendra Rao on sitar and Saskia Rao-de Haas on cello, with Subrata Bhattacharya on tabla. The married couple has performed at some of the major concert halls and music festivals in the world, bridging South Asian and European music traditions.
South Asia Program Seminar Series and Events
2024-2025
We hosted a robust series of events in Fall 2024, including a week-long residency with P. Sainath, and the Bangladesh Now webinar. A list of events with links with further details is available in the link below.
We hosted an exciting series of events in Spring 2025, including fourth Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium symposium and our first South Asian New Year Celebration. A list of events with links with further details is available in the link below.
Afghanistan in the Classroom Workshop
Upstate New York has welcomed a significant number of Afghan families in recent years. This virtual workshop, held on September 13, 2024, provided elementary school educators with approaches and tools to introduce Afghanistan into their curriculum and offer a nuanced view of the country's people and culture.
The workshop was facilitated by Akbar Quraishi and Amy Friers, alumni of Syracuse University's Public Administration and International Affairs program, who both have extensive experience in Afghanistan. Together, they founded an international relations-focused university in Kabul, in addition to working with the previous Afghan government and NGOs in Afghanistan.
Afro-South Asian Musical Intersections at Onondaga Community College
By Sam Cushman
Roughly five weeks after I put the finishing touches on a Ph.D. in Music at University of California Santa Cruz, Onondaga Community College (OCC) hired me to teach three courses in the Spring 2024 semester. My specializations in Hindustani music and its globalization afforded few direct points of contact with the community college curriculum, but I found refuge from European classicism in Music of the African Diaspora, which I taught for three consecutive semesters at OCC. The course introduces students to select West African music cultures and traces diasporic syncretisms across the circum-Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas. An initial period of intensive preparation for that course led me to the Indo-Caribbean music cultures of Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and elsewhere, which provided a compelling angle for bringing my areas of expertise into the classroom while also continuing to educate myself.
The challenges of lecturing on Caribbean music for the first time prompted me to apply for the Community College Internationalization Fellowship (CCIF), and with the support of the Cornell Latin American & Caribbean Studies program and the Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium, I refreshed and refined my approach with new content on Indo-Caribbean music. Several trips to the Cornell libraries and access to online databases provided ample materials for my project. At the Cox Library of Music and Dance, Music Librarian Lenora Schneller and her staff graciously helped me locate relevant books and introduced me to the Smithsonian Global Sound database, which proved to be a valuable resource. The resulting course content for Music of the African Diaspora dovetails with lessons on Jamaican, Afro-Cuban, and Afro-Brazilian music cultures. Yet these additions offer unique perspectives on how proximate diasporic cultures can blend organically, to an extent, while also resisting syncretism and seeking to maintain distinct cultural and political identities.
During my fellowship period, I twice joined South Asia Program Manager Daniel Bass on Monsoon Radio, his biweekly radio show on WRFI Community Radio in Ithaca. From the beginning, Daniel helped guide my inquiries by sharing his knowledge of Indo-Caribbean music. My guest appearances on Monsoon Radio allowed us to discuss the resonant, if sometimes amorphous, intersections of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian performance practices in a range of popular music genres from calypso and soca to dancehall reggae, diasporic bhangra, and desi hip-hop.
Overall, the CCIF enriched my understanding of Indo-Caribbean music cultures, as intended, and provided valuable educational opportunities for students at OCC. I cannot pretend every community college student finds the intersections of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian music cultures as profound as I do, but last fall, I had a student approach and thank me after my Indo-Caribbean lecture. He explained that his grandmother is Indo-Trinidadian and that, in his experience, no one really discusses that culture or its music. For him, my CCIF project opened a window into ethnic heritage and family history. For me, that experience alone justified the effort.
New South Asia
Studies Librarian
In 2025, Kelsey Utne returned to Cornell as our new South Asia Studies Librarian. Kelsey finished her Ph.D. in History at Cornell in 2022 and was a SAP FLAS fellow for Hindi for two years. Before initially coming to Ithaca, she earned an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Washington. Most recently, Kelsey was a professor of history at Arkansas Tech University. She has also worked in public history, prison education, and as a Persian interpreter for the Ithaca Public School system.
Kelsey’s study and research trips to India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and the United Kingdom have been supported by institutions including the American Institute of Indian Studies, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Critical Language Scholarship Program, Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright. Her current book project, Into the Necroscape, makes the case for situating the martyrdom of Hindu and Muslim nationalists within a landscape of corpse disposal practices and corpse commemoration in late-colonial South Asia.
SAP Director Sarah Besky wins 2025 SUNY Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence
by Olivia M. Hall
SAP Director Sarah Besky was one of eighteen faculty and staff in Cornell’s four contract colleges selected for the 2024–25 State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence, for major contributions to building the academic community at Cornell and in the profession. She developed research and study abroad opportunities in South Asia and served as president of the Society for the Anthropology of Work from 2019 to 2023. The honor is presented annually, recognizing awardees on campuses across the SUNY system for their commitment to sustaining intellectual vibrancy, advancing the boundaries of knowledge, providing the highest quality of instruction, and serving the public good.
Mahnoor Cheema receives 2025 Lisa Sansoucy Language Scholar Award
"I often say, I am learning Punjabi in the loving memory of my father... Every lesson brings me closer to his memory and my roots."
The 2025 Lisa Sansoucy Language Scholar Award was awarded to Mahnoor B. Cheema, a senior in Biological Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Mahnoor has completed four semesters of Punjabi through the Shared Course Initiative (SCI) and embodies the deep passion for language, heritage, and cultural connection that this award celebrates. Mahnoor's story is one of both personal healing and scholarly pursuit, rooted in a mission to preserve her Punjabi heritage.
Recently Graduated Students 2024-2025
Fiona Coleman, Ph. D., Nutrition | From Program to Plate: Within-Household Insights from Nutrition-Sensitive Social Protection and Agriculture Programs Implemented in Bangladesh
Du Fei, Ph. D., History | Local Women, Global Histories? Gendering Economic Life, Law, and Islam in Early Modern Transregional India
Heather Guetterman, Ph. D., Nutrition | Vitamin B12, One-Carbon Metabolism, and Metabolic Health in Women of Reproductive Age
Mushahid Hussain, Ph. D., Development Studies | Grounding Decolonization: Nationalist Time, Development Regimes, and Cold War Antinomies in the Making of Bangladesh, 1947-1971
Aparajita Majumdar, Ph. D., History | Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge, and Heritage in a South Asian Borderland
Chanchal Pramanik, Ph. D., Regional Science | Digital Extension Services and Agricultural Productivity: Three Essays
Trishna Senapaty, Ph. D., Anthropology | The Closed and the Open Prison: The Shifting Horizon of Carceral Reform in India
Vanisha Sharma, Ph. D., Applied Economics and Management | Digitization of Rural India and the Agricultural Sector
Bruno Shirley, Ph. D., Asian Literature, Religion and Culture | A Study of Buddhism, Gender, and Politics in Early Second Millennium Sri Lanka
Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, M.R.P., Regional Planning | Dialectics of Debris: A Grounded Analysis of Construction and Demolition Waste in Bangalore
Whitman Barrett, M.S., Soil and Crop Sciences | Human Excreta-Derived Soil Amendments: Evaluating Current Use, Facilitating Responsible and Agriculturally Effective Future Use
Ian Bellows, M.A., Asian Studies | Tourism, Vulnerability, and Adaptation on Nepal's Tamang Heritage Trail
Nitya Ragaleena Cherukumalli, M.P.S., Natural Resources | Stormwater Management Plan for Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad, India
Advait Deshmukh, M.R.P., Regional Planning | Wire Gully: A Story of Change And Accumulation in Mumbai’s Eastern Suburbia, 2017-2024
Mansi Jani, M.R.P., Regional Planning | Between Informal Logics and Formal Logistics: Street Vending Practices in Law Garden, Ahmedabad
Medha Kulkarni, M.R.P., Regional Planning | Collective Agency in the Margins the Role of Women's Savings Groups in Informal Governance and Development in Nairobi and Pune
Yenan Jin, M.S., Applied Economics and Management | Structural Transformation and Food Security in India: Exploring Income Dynamics and Health-Related Consumption Patterns
Noor Malik, M.R.P., Regional Planning | Urban Heat and Social Vulnerability: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Planning Decisions and Thermal Inequality in Lahore, Pakistan
Kushal Kumar Reddy Digavinti Venkata Siva Satya S, M.S., Applied Economics and Management | Impact of Exposure to Genetically Modified Eggplant on Women’s Empowerment in Bangladesh
Jahnvi Verma, M.S., Applied Economics and Management | Behavioral Economics and Universal Basic Income (UBI): Investigating the Impact of UBI Policy
The South Asia Program Welcomes Your Support!
GIFTS from Cornell alumni and other friends are a key resource for SAP, allowing us to protect foundational strengths, while also expanding South Asian Studies at Cornell in innovative ways.
GIVING to the South Asia Program has never been easier. Just click the Support button on the upper right of our homepage, and you can give to SAP as a one-time or recurring gift. Should you wish to direct your gift more specifically (for instance, towards student fellowships), please contact Director Sarah Besky at besky@cornell.edu. Professor Besky will also help to coordinate larger gifts with appropriate offices at Cornell.
The South Asia Program (SAP) is an interdisciplinary hub for Cornell students, faculty, staff, community members, and academic visitors. The U.S. Department of Education has designated SAP as a National Resource Center for South Asia, one of just eight in the United States.
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Credits:
Designed by Gloria Lemus-Chavez and edited by Daniel Bass - -Cover image of Scenic Evening on a Bangladesh Village Lake by Rayan Rakib --Table of Contents image, Tiger Tiraha Plibhit by ArmouredCyborg