Affiliated Faculty

Aarti Sethi

Assistant Professor
Anthropology

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...

Manisha Shah

Chancellor's Professor
Public Policy

Mainsha Shah is a development economist whose primary research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of applied microeconomics, health, and development. She originally received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. She has written several papers on the economics of sex markets in order to learn how more effective policies and programs can be deployed to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. She also works in the area of child health and education. Shah has been the PI on various impact evaluations and randomized controlled trials and is currently leading...

Elora Shehabuddin

Director; Professor
Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies
Gender and Women's Studies
Global Studies

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...

Matthew Shutzer

Assistant Professor
History

Puninder Singh

Community Lecturer in Sikh Studies
South and Southeast Asian Studies

Puninder Singh completed his PhD in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2024. His work broadly examines how language and ideas about language mediate religious experience, particularly in the Sikh tradition. His current work examines the development of a new Sikh intellectual formation between 1920-1940, after the era of the Singh Sabha reform movement. He is also at work on several projects that examine how the Sikh tradition has engaged in dialogic and interactive relations with those around it, both linguistically and otherwise, in the long durée, from the early...

Jvala Singh

Lecturer
South and Southeast Asian Studies

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.

Travis Smith

Lecturer
South and Southeast Asian Studies

Travis LaMar Smith is a Sanskritist with interests in religious and mythological narrative literature (epics and Purāṇas) as well as erotic and sexological literature (Kāmaśāstra). Before joining SSEAS, he was previously an Associate Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Seoul National University, South Korea. His current project is a critical edition and translation of the Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana.

Mahesh Srinivasan

Associate Professor
Psychology
My research focuses on linguistic and cognitive development, and I also study social cognitive development across different cultural contexts. My research on language and cognition spans topics such as word learning, lexical semantics, pragmatics, linguistic relativity, historical semantic change and cross-linguistic typology. My research in social cognitive development focuses on intergroup attitudes, social norms, moral reasoning, and religious cognition.

Clare Talwalker

Lecturer
International and Area Studies
Global Poverty and Practice

Clare Talwalker is a continuing lecturer in Global Studies and Political Economy, and also core faculty of the Global Poverty and Practice Minor. Trained in cultural anthropology, her research focuses on India, social inequalities, the modern public sphere, and postcoloniality. She has also written about student engagement in aid and anti-poverty work. She offers classes on global poverty and practice, political economy, economic anthropology, and India. Talwalker grew up in Mumbai, India. She earned her B.A. at Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. at Duke University.

Stacey Van Vleet

Assistant Professor
History

I am a historian of Tibet and Inner Asia. My research and teaching are concerned with the place of Tibet in regional and global histories, and with how Tibetan historiography - and relatedly, that of contemporary states including China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Russia - has been shaped by modern transformations in knowledge, economy, culture, and governance.

My book in progress, The World the Medicine Buddha Built: Tibetan Medical Technologies and Infrastructure in Qing Inner Asia, examines the rise of a vast network of Tibetan medical institutions across...