Executive Committee
Monisha Das Gupta
- Ph.D. in Sociology, Brandeis University, 1999
- Director, Center for South Asian Studies and Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies, University of Hawai’i
- Email: dasgupta@hawaii.edu
Dr. Das Gupta joined UHM in 2002 as a joint appointment in Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. She received her PhD in Sociology at Brandeis University. Her involvement with various types of social justice movements in the United States, and her life as a migrant are central to her academic work. Her first book, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Duke, 2006), examines feminist, queer, and labor organizing in post-1965 South Asian communities in the United States to mark the development of social justice politics that forwards immigrant rights. She grew up in Kolkata, India, where she did her undergraduate degree in Geography at Loreto College, and worked in the city for a few years as a journalist.
Ned bertz
- BS & BA Illinois, 1994; MA, PhD Iowa, 1998, 2008
- Assistant Professor in History (South Asia, Africa, Indian Ocean, World History)
- Email: bertz@hawaii.edu
Originally from Chicago, Ned Bertz attended the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), including a year abroad at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), and graduated with degrees in History and Accountancy. Choosing the past over profit, he moved a few cornfields to the west to study for his MA and Ph.D. in History at the University of Iowa. Seeking to bridge area studies approaches and write about transnational historical exchanges between South Asia and East Africa, Professor Bertz has spent five years conducting fieldwork in India and Tanzania in preparation for writing a book considering issues of race, nationalism, and diaspora in the history of the Indian Ocean world. He teaches classes about the history of South Asia, Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and historiography, among other offerings. Additionally, he is very interested in social justice and human rights, gender studies, African and South Asian music, Indian popular cinema (and is rumored to have once appeared in a Bollywood blockbuster), and is fully confident that this is the year for the Chicago Cubs.
sai bhatawadekar
- Ph.D. in Ohio State University 2007
- Assistant Professor in Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures
- Email: saib@hawaii.edu
Dr. Bhatawadekar’s research brings together German and South Asian Studies, Philosophy and Religious Studies, and Cross-Culural and Comparative Studies. Her other research interests include film adaptations of literature, South Asian cinema, and language pedagogy. During and after her Ph.D. she designed, taught, and established a very successful Hindi language and South Asian Studies Program at the Ohio State University, which has consequently brought her here to Hawaii. She is currently working on examining the transition from Hinduism to Buddhism in 19th century German philosophy as well as on a Hindi text-and workbook.
monica ghosh
- South Asian Librarian in the Asia Collection at Hamilton Library University of Hawaii at Manoa
- Email: monicag@hawaii.edu
Monica Ghosh manages South Asia materials in the Asia Collection, which includes maintaining and developing materials received on a cooperative acquistions program administered through the Library of Congress, selecting materials in all formats and in several languages from other sources, and designing, developing and providing access to electronic information about South Asia. Provide professional reference service for the Asia Collection in general, and specialized reference service for South Asia related information. Provide a program of library instruction for Asian Studies courses.
Reece Jones
- Ph.D in Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Assistant Professor of Geography
- Email: reecej@hawaii.edu
Dr. Jones’ research interests are in the changing geography of political systems in the contemporary era of globalization. He investigates what role political borders and modern notions of sovereignty play as the world becomes increasingly connected culturally, economically, and politically. His regional interest is in South Asia, specifically on the lingering political and territorial consequences of partition in West Bengal and Bangladesh. He is currently completing a book about border walls and fences entitled Borders, Barriers, and the War on Terror: Security Fences in the United States, India, and Israel to be published in 2012 by Zed Books.
jaishree odin
- Ph.D. in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
- Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies
Dr. Jaishree Odin’s areas of teaching and research include critical theory, cultural studies of science and technology, new-media literature, literary ecology, postcolonial literature, and Kashmiri literature. She has also published on new technologies and their impact on higher education. Odin’s book on new-media literature Hypertext and the Female Imaginary was published by the University of Minnesota Press (Fall 2010). A book chapter on new-media literature appeared in Women, Art and Technology (MIT Press, 2004). Several other essays on new-media literature, literary ecology, and postcolonial literature were published in Genre, Electronic Book Review, Iowa Review Web, Modern Fiction Studies, Arts Wire Current, Postcolonial Theory and Criticism Web, Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and Comparative Literature Studies. She has also contributed entries to the Encyclopedia of Literature and Science (Greenwood Press, 2002).
miriam sharma
- PhD University of Hawai‘i
- Professor of Asian Studies
Dr. Sharma’s scholarship deals with ethnography, class formation and gender relations, feminist theory, international labor migration and social science methodology. She has published on income generations schemes and women in rural India, the political economy of reproductive activities in Rajasthan, and the impact of dairy ‘development’ on the lives and health of women in rural Rajasthan.
ROHINI ACHARYA
- Coordinator, Center for South Asian Studies and MFA Candidate in Dance