Affiliated Faculty

Ayesha Mahmud is a demographer, who is broadly interested in the interplay between human population changes, environmental factors, and infectious disease dynamics. Her research draws on theory and methods from demography and disease ecology, to answer questions such as - why do outbreaks occur at certain times of the year? How and why does the mortality burden of infectious diseases vary over time? How do population travel patterns drive the spatial dynamics of outbreaks? How will global environmental and demographic changes alter the landscape of infectious disease burden in the future?...

I am an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. My first book Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s.

Luther Obrock is a Sanskritist. He is interested in the literary and cultural history of second millennium South Asia, particularly the production of Sanskrit literature during the Sultanate period. Dr. Obrock concentrates on kāvya, or elite ornate poetry in Sanskrit, and its continued use and relevance in medieval India. His current research focuses on literary histories of Kashmir from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. Dr. Obrock teaches a wide range of topics, including early Indian civilization, epics in South Asia, Hindu-...

Abhijeet Paul, Ph.D. South and Southeast Asia, UC Berkeley (2015). He teaches, researches, and publishes on the history, culture, ecology, and politics of jute in Bengal and South Asia. He is currently writing his monograph on jute and finishing a docu-feature film on jute cultures in Bengal and South Asia.