Affiliated Faculty

Sanchita Banerjee Saxena is a researcher working at the intersection of social science, public policy, and business and human rights. She is currently the Executive Director of the Institute for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies under the Institute. She is also a lecturer of responsible business at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Saxena is the editor of Labor, Global Supply Chains, and the Garment Industry in South Asia: Bangladesh after Rana Plaza (Routledge,...

Aarti Sethi is assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book that examines cash-crop agricultural economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society. She is...

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at the Institute for South Asia Studies. She was Professor of Transnational Asian Studies and Core Faculty in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University prior to moving to Berkeley in 2022. She was Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at UC Irvine in 1999–2001. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University...

Jvala Singh (Sukh Sembi) joins UC Berkeley as a lecturer for Punjabi while completing his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he is examining pre-colonial Sikh historical narratives. This examination explores literature in Punjabi and Brajbhasha from the 18th and 19th centuries, building off his previous M.A. research completed at the University of Toronto, where he focused on Sikh Brajbhasha versions of Sanskrit epics, such as the Ramayana.