Biographical Information - Board of Editors

Biographical Information -
Board of Editors

Srimati Basu is an assistant professor of Anthropology, Women's Studies and Asian Studies at DePauw University. Her courses include: Women in
International Development, Women and Work, Peoples and Cultures of India, South Asian Writing. Her research interests are in legal
anthropology, development, feminist jurisprudence, feminist pedagogy,
and post colonial studies. She is the author of "She Comes to Take Her
Rights: Indian Women, Property and Propriety" and other articles on
women and law in India, and has recently also been working on projects
dealing with popular culture, resistance, family courts and Indo-Trinidadian representations. Her undergraduate degree in English is from Presidency College, Calcutta, her M.A. in English from Purdue University and her interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Women's Studies, Anthropology and Cultural Studies from the Ohio State University.

Ian Copland was born in Perth, Australia, and educated at the University of Western Australia and Balliol College, Oxford. He teaches history at Monash University, Melbourne, where he is an associate professor. Dr. Copland is also a member of the board of directors of the National Centre for South Asian Studies and editor of the journal South Asia. His publications include The Burden of Empire: Perspectives on Imperialism and Colonialism (OUP Melbourne, 1990), The Princes Of India In the End-game Of Empire, 1917-1947 (Cambridge, 1997), and India 1885-1947: the Unmaking of an Empire (London: Pearson Education, 2001).

Rekha Datta is currently Associate Professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. She joined the department in 1994. Dr. Datta received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Connecticut in 1990. She has a 1st M.A. in Political Science from Calcutta University and a 1st class B.A. honors in Political Science from Presidency College, Calcutta. The recipient of several scholarships and research grants in India and the United States, Dr. Datta has taught at Loreto College and Scottish Church College in Calcutta and at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York..

Dr. Datta is the author of Why Alliances Endure: The United States-Pakistan Alliance, 1954-1971. She is co-editor, with Judith Kornberg, of Women in Developing Countries: Strategies of Empowerment, Lynne Rienner Publishers, forthcoming. In addition, she has published many articles in refereed journals and chapters in edited volumes. Her research interests focus on issues of gender and development, security, and international relations and organizations, primarily, the United Nations. She has chaired panels at regional, national, and international conferences and has presented about two dozen papers at professional conferences. She is also active in the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and the Northeast Political Science Association. Her current research includes projects on non-governmental organizations and their role in civil society and global governance, women in third world countries, child labor issues, and security issues in India and Pakistan.

Geraldine Forbes is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History and Director of Women's Studies at the State University of New York Oswego. Her publications include The memoirs of Dr. Haimabati Sen: from child widow to lady doctor, (translated by Tapan Raychaudhuri, edited by Geraldine Forbes and Tapan Raychaudhuri, introduced by Geraldine Forbes) (2000), Women in Modern India (1996), and Positivism in Bengal (1975). She is Series Editor of FOREMOTHER LEGACIES: Autobiographies and Memoirs of Women from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, a series that now includes six books. In this series she has edited and introduced An Indian Freedom Fighter Recalls her Life by Manmohini Zutshi Sahgal and Memoirs of an Indian Woman by Shudha Mazumdar, and edited and written the Afterword for Nadia, Captive of Hope: Memoir of an Arab Woman by Fay Afaf Kanafani. At present she is working on three projects, on gender and colonial medicine, family photography in 20th century India, and the Tarakeswar Murder Case of 1873. Geraldine Forbes teaches courses in world history, women's history, and India and the Middle East.

Jayati Ghosh received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from University of
Calcutta, India. She obtained an M.A. from Wilfrid Laurier University,
Ontario, Canada in 1986 and Ph.D. in 1991, from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Ghosh currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She was the recipient of University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater Academic Staff Excellence Award, 1997. This award recognizes outstanding performance by an instructional academic staff. She has published papers in journals such as Geography, Wisconsin Geographer, and has a chapter in a book entitled Geographic and Planning Research Themes for the New Millennium, published by Vikas Publishing, New Delhi. Currently she is editing a book, HIV/AIDs in Africa: Mapping the Issues which will be published by Blackwell Publishers.

B. M. Jain is currently Research Scientist (the national level position) in political science at South Asia Studies Centre, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India. He received his Ph.D. in political science, with a focus on international relations, from the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur in 1983. Holding a first class post-graduate degree in political science, he first joined as a Lecturer in political science in 1969. His teaching (graduate and post-graduate classes) and research experience span over three decades. Prof. Jain has held national level positions such as ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Sciences Research) Fellow and UGC (University Grants Commission) Fellow. He has authored and edited over a dozen books. Notably among his independent works include South Asian Security: Problems and Prospects; India and the United States; South Asia, India, and the US; Nuclear Politics in South Asia: In Search of Alternative Paradigm; and India's Defence and Security: Intra-regional Dimensions, and Nuclearisation in South Asia (ed. with E.M. Hexamer). Prof. Jain has contributed over five dozen papers/book chapters in prominent journals in India and abroad. He has lectured at more than two dozen universities in the United States and Europe as well as many universities in Asia and has presented over three dozen papers at international and national conferences/seminars. Dr. Jain has been Editor of the Indian Journal of Asian Affairs since1988; he has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies (Seoul, Korea) and the Henry L. Stimson Center (Washington, D.C., USA). His current research interests include international security, global disarmament, and Northeast and Southeast Asia.

Roger D. Long is professor of history at the Department of History and Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University. He received his B.A. from the University of London (1977) and his Ph.D from UCLA (1985). He has taught at Aitchison College in Lahore, Kansai University of Foreign Studies in Osaka, Japan, California State University, Fullerton, and the University of Calgary. His publications include The Man on the Spot: Essays on British Empire History and The Founding of Pakistan: An Annotated Bibliography. He is currently working on a volume on the life of the first prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan.

John McGuire is director of the South Asia Research Unit, Curtin University of Technology. He received his B.A. from the University of Western Australia, his M.A. from the University of Manitoba and his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a general editor for the Studies on Contemporary South Asia Series, Sage Publications; area editor (Central, South and West Asia) of the Asian Studies Review; and co-editor of the South Asia Regional Team, of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), an ongoing project initiated by the University of California, Berkeley. He has researched and published on the social and economic history of Bengal in the nineteenth century; the relationship between India, British Imperialism and the world economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the history of fisheries in Bengal from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries; and the political economy of post colonial India.

Patit Paban Mishra holds an M.A. from Delhi University and doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He received his D.Litt from Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta. Presently he is a Reader (Associate Professor) of History at Sambalpur University, Orissa, India. His articles have been published in various journals, such as ECIMS (Moscow), ICT (Amsterdam), Tai Culture (Berlin), IIAS Newsletter (Amsterdam), Asian Review (Hong Kong), Proceedings of Indian History Congress, Asian Studies (Calcutta), Bengal Past & Present (Calcutta), and Indian Archives (New Delhi), among others. His publications and projects relate to topics such as India's cultural rapprochement with Southeast Asia, medieval urban centers of Orissa, and tribal resistance movements in the colonial period. Dr. Mishra regularly attends national and international conference and is connected with different academic organizations.

Rekha Pande teaches in the Department of History in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Hyderabad, where she is Reader. She has been in the department since 1984 and works in interdisciplinary areas of history and women s studies. A gold medallist from the University of Allahabad, she did her Ph.D. in medieval Indian history. She has also taught in the Department of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Allahabad. She is the member of various boards of studies in various universities in India. Her primary areas of research interest are medieval social and cultural history, with special reference to religious reform movements, agrarian structures, miniature paintings and women. She is the author of the book Succession in the Delhi Sultanate (New Delhi: Commonwealth Publications, 1990). She is also the author of a number of book chapters, and articles in national and international journals on the themes of Bhakti movement, agrarian structures, society and culture in medieval India, medieval Deccan and women s history.

For the last two decades, Rekha Pande has also been involved with contemporary women s issues. She is the founder member of Streemela, a society for the development of women. She has also written a number of articles on women s movements, women in unorganized sectors, women and health, and child labor. She has carried out eleven projects on themes related to cr ches in the organized and unorganized sectors, girl child and family, child labour in the beedi industry, child labor in the old city, the anti- arrack movement, gender issues in the police, and women in the unorganized sectors. She has also done a number of consultancies for both governmental and nongovernmental sectors on projects such as mobile cr ches, women in unorganized sectors, child labor and socio-economic profiles. She is presently involved in a multi-cultural study with the Tokyo Christian University on women in the unorganized sectors. Dr. Pande has attended a number of conferences in India and abroad on history and gender questions. She has delivered invited lectures at Lusaka University, Zambia, Byro-Kano University in Nigeria, Oxford University and also attended and presented papers at Hong Kong University, the Gender Result Conference, Taipei, and World Health Conference at Kobe, Japan.

Sheela Prasad is Reader, Centre for Regional Studies, University of Hyderabad. Her training is in geography and she received both her M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests are interdisciplinary in nature and include urban and regional geography, health, environment and gender issues. She was earlier Faculty in the Centre for Area Studies, Osmania University, from 1984 to 1996. Dr. Prasad visited the Institute of Planning Studies, University of Nottingham, U.K in 1990 on a faculty exchange programme sponsored by the British Council and the University Grants Commission. In 1994, she visited Tanzania to attend a workshop on "Population Control Policies and Implications for Women". She was invited as an Interport Lecturer on the Semester at Sea programme of the University of Pittsburgh in its fall 1998 voyage. She is associated with the Study India Program of the University of Hyderabad in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh that began in 1998. Dr. Prasad has a number of publications to her credit in leading journals. She has completed two research projects, one jointly with the University of Nottingham on slum improvement and another funded by ICSSR on privatization of health care. She has just completed working on a UGC project on "Population Control Policies and Women in the Third World - A Study of India", and is currently working on another project as Co-investigator on "Reconceptualising Peace in the Indian Ocean region". She is the author of a book Urban Health Care: A study of Public and Corporate Hospitals in Hyderabad and is the Co-editor of the book, The Third World City : Emerging Contours. She has been associated with Anveshi Research centre for Women's Studies in Hyderabad since 1990 and is presently an Executive member of Anveshi. She is actively involved with various NGOs working in the health and environment sector in Hyderabad.

Aparna Rayaprol, a sociologist at University of Hyderabad, is the Academic Consultant for the Study India Program at the university. She has an M.Phil from the University of Hyderabad and a Ph.D in Sociology from University of Pittsburgh. She has been working on issues related to gender and identity in the Indian diaspora in the United States. Her doctoral work on South Indian immigrants in Pittsburgh is based on an ethnography at the Sri Venkateswara temple in Pittsburgh and explores how religion, ethnicity, and gender are reconstructed and transformed in the diasporic context. The work, titled, Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora, was published by Oxford University Press, Delhi (1997). Currently she is working on issues related to identity among second generation Indian-Americans in the US. Initially funded by a grant from the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), she continued this work as a fellow at the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University in the year 1998-99. She has several articles and books reviews in scholarly journals and edited books, and presented papers at national and international conferences. Recently, she has contributed entries on South Asians and Hinduism for the Encyclopedia of American Culture, Routledge (forthcoming). Dr. Rayaprol has been teaching at the University of Hyderabad since 1994. For some time, she was also a Reader in the Department of Research Methodology at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay. She has taught American undergraduates for four years at University of Pittsburgh and also serves as an Interport Lecturer for the university s Semester-at-Sea Program conducted by the Institute of Shipboard Education. She has taught the following courses: Social Stratification, Sociology of Gender, Qualitative Research Methods, Ethnographic Approaches to Indian Society, and Sociological Theory. She is actively engaged in giving lectures at the University of Hyderabad s Academic Staff College and has also been giving radio talks in the city.

Prakash C. Sarangi (b. 1954) is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. He received an M.A. from Delhi University and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester (NY). He has also taught at Utkal and Rochester universities and was an Academic Fellow at the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad. He is the author of several papers and of two books, Political Exchange and Public Policy (1990) and Liberal Theories of State (1996). His research interests revolve around liberal democratic theory and practices.

Jishnu Shankar is an adjunct instructor of South Asia/Languages and Literatures at Syracuse University, where he teaches Hindi and Urdu. He holds and M.A. from Syracuse University (1988) and an M.A. from Delhi School of Economics (1986), a Post-Graduate Diploma in Journalism, Indian Institute of Mass Communication (1984), and a B.A. from Delhi University (1983). His current research is on the Kinaram Tradition. He has field work experience in India and his major publications include a work on Aghor Vachan Shastra, Sri Sarveshwari Samooh, Varanasi, India, 1990. He also has extensive Web experience, which includes AghorPages: http://www.aghor.org, 1994, and Hindi/Urdu Lessons on the Web: http://syllabus.syr.edu/hin/jshankar/hin101/hindi.html, 1997.

Udaya Narayana Singh was born in Calcutta in 1951. Formerly Professor and Head of Applied Linguistics at the University of Hyderabad, he is currently Director and Professor of the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore. A linguist by training (educated at Calcutta and Delhi Universities), Professor Singh is a creative writer in Maithili (with three collections of poems and eight plays) and a poet-critic in Bengali (five books and twenty-one papers). In Maithili, he writes under the pen-name of 'Nachiketa'. His books of poems in Maithili include Kavayo Vadanti (1966), Amrtasya putraah (1971), AnuttaraN (1981), and major plays are Naayakak naam jiivan (1971), Ek chal raajaa (1974), NaaTakak lel (1974), Aandolan (1977), and Priyamvadaa (1988). His books in Bengali include collections of poems, such as Asru o Parihas (1998), and Khaam-kheyaalii (1999), and translated poems, such as Anukriti (1999) which followed his books in criticism, including Upanyaser Sahityatattva (1999), Bangla Kabitar Prakritayan (1992), Mith Saahitya Sanskriti (1990), and Kabitaar bhaaSaa (1987). His major work on translation of Tagore's writing for children, Raviindranaathak Baalsaahitya, was published by the Sahitya Akademi in 1998. Professor Singh has taught in several leading universities in the country, including Delhi, MSU-Baroda, Surat, and Hyderabad. He has been a visiting professor at the IIAS, Shimla, a Visiting Lecturer at Delhi, an LSA fellow at Urbana-Champaign, and received Uggersain Memorial Gold Medal of Delhi University and Jubilee Award of Calcutta University. He has visited and lectured in the USA, Russia, Italy, the former East Germany, Germany, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. His publication in linguistics (4 books and 96 papers) has been in wide-ranging areas.

Heather Streets received her doctorate in the history of Britain and the British Empire from Duke University in 1998, where she specialized in colonial Indian history and in theories of race, gender and the nation. She is now an assistant professor at Washington State University, where she teaches the history of European Imperialism, Britain, and World Civilizations. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Honor, Duty, and Vigour: Martial Races, Masculinity, and the Military in the Late Victorian British Empire, which explores the racial and gendered ideologies that buttressed recruiting practices in both India and Britain.

Savia Viegas is senior lecturer and Department Head of Ancient History (since 1989) of Kishinchand Chellaram College (affiliated to the University of Mumbai). She teaches social and art history of South Asia at the undergraduate level and Art History at the postgraduate levels. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Mumbai as well as a Post-Graduate Diploma in Journalism. Her doctoral dissertation was titles The Construction of Gender as Evidenced in Satavahana Sculptural Art (2000). She has published extensively in Indian papers and journals, besides holding editorial positions with the Times of India group of newspapers (1980-84), Task force on Media of the National Commission appointed by HRD Ministry under the chairpersonship of Ela Bhatt to look into Issues of Women working in the Informal Sector (1988-89) and Humanscape Journal (1995-98) in Mumbai. Her current research is on visitors to Prince of Wales Museum and empirical data for the same is in the final stages of compilation. Other research interests include history and folk-lore of Goa, yaksha and yavana imagery in Indian sculpture.

N. Ree Wells received her Ph.D. in sociology, with a minor in cultural anthropology, from Louisiana State University in 1993. Currently, she is an associate professor of sociology at Missouri Southern State College. She teaches Introduction to Sociology, Social Problems, Social Stratification, Gender Roles, the Sociology of Health & Illness, the Sociology of Work & Leisure, and the Sociology of Education. Her recent publications include a chapter on "Divorce and Poverty" in Extraordinary Behavior: Case Studies in the Unusual (Greenwood Press, 2000) and a chapter on "Sexual Behaviors" in Social Problems: A Case Study Approach (General Hall, 2000). Currently, she is editing a special issue of the Sociological Spectrum entitled "Medical Sociology: Health and Illness Issues for the New Millennium." Dr. Wells attended the Study India Program (SIP) at the University of Hyderabad in Summer 2000. Partly as a result of this set of experiences, she is developing an Introduction to Indian Society course for undergraduate students at MSSC. Also, she hopes to conduct research with the "Small Family by Choice Project" of the Family Planning Association of India in Bhopal.