Affiliated Faculty

Jitendra Malik

Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Jitendra Malik is Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also holds appointments in vision science, cognitive science and Bioengineering. He received the PhD degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985 following which he joined UC Berkeley as a faculty member. He served as Chair of the Computer Science Division during 2002-2006, and of the Department of EECS during 2004-2006.

Salar Mameni

Assistant Professor
Ethnic Studies

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.

Priya Moorjani

Assistant Professor
Molecular and Cell Biology

Priya did a bachelors in Computer Engineering at the University of Mumbai and M.S. in Bioinformatics at George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University, working with David Reich and Nick Patterson. She did her postdoc with Molly Przeworski at Columbia University. She moved to Berkeley in 2018.

Luther Obrock

Assistant Professor
South and Southeast Asian Studies

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-...

Rahul Parson

Assistant Professor
South and Southeast Asian Studies

Rahul Parson received an MA and PhD in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, with a specialization in Modern Hindi literature. Before returning to the Berkeley in 2021, he served as an Assistant Professor of Hindi and Urdu at the University of Colorado, Boulder (2016-2020) and a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Postdoctoral Researcher) at Max-Weber-Kolleg, Universität Erfurt, Germany (2014-2016). Rahul Parson’s area of specialization is Hindi literature and literary history, with a particular emphasis on Hindi movements in Bengal. His book project, Confluences...

Abhijeet Paul

Lecturer
South and Southeast Asian Studies

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.

Ajay Pillarisetti

Assistant Professor
Environmental Health Sciences
Ajay Pillarisetti is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences whose research focuses on the impacts of energy use — typically at the household level — on air pollution exposure, health, and climate change.

Alison E. Post

Associate Professor
Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies

Bharathy Sankara Rajulu

Lecturer
South and Southeast Asian Studies

Research and teaching interests: Tamil Language, Grammar and Literature – Ancient, Medieval and Modern | Telugu Language, Grammar and Contemporary Literature | Telugu Language, Grammar and Modern literature

Harsha Ram

Associate Professor
Slavic Languages and Literatures
Comparative Literature

Harsha Ram's first book, The Imperial Sublime (2003) addressed the relationship between poetic genre, aesthetic theory, territorial space and political power in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian, Russian-French and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernisms. His forthcoming book, The Geopoetics of Sovereignty. Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter, seeks to provide a historical account of cultural relations between...