Bios

Solomon Benjamin is with the faculty of the Humanities and Social Science Department of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in India. Benjamin’s contribution to the academic literature has been the concept ‘Occupancy Urbanism’ where territoriality operates beyond the logics of Master Plans.  He has a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and SM in Architectural Studies from MIT’s Department of Architecture. Benjamin’s current work focuses on the relationship between Indian and Chinese cities shaped by small firm economies, and small town urbanization in coastal South India. Benjamin is part of several international research projects, and also critical art groups: the RAQs media collective in their Delhi based program: ‘City as Studio’, and most recently, invited to be part of their ’15 Invitations’ by the Hong Kong based Asian Art Archive. Benjamin has published in journals (IJURR, SARAI reader, GeoForum, Agone, and Review Trie Monde) with translations into French, Spanish, German, and Catalan. He was faculty in the School of Social Sciences at Bangalore’s National Institute of Advanced Studies, in the University of Toronto’s Department of Political Science, and a visiting faculty at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

Professor Bose is Professor of History at Harvard University. Bose's field of specialization is modern South Asian and Indian Ocean history. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His books include His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) and A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.) In A Hundred Horizons, Bose crosses area studies and disciplinary frontiers as he bridges the domains of political economy and culture. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997. Bose is currently writing a book titled Asia after Europe: Decline and Rise of a Continent (under contract with Harvard University Press) and working as General Editor on The Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean.

Dr. Cao Yin is right now a Post-Doctoral fellow at Center for Global Asia, New York University Shanghai. He holds a PhD degree from the history department of National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the Sino-Indian connection in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Additionally, he writes extensively on global history, modern Chinese history, and the British Empire.

Born in Paris to Chinese parents, Anne Cheng was educated in the French state school system, focusing on classics and European literature and philosophy, until she entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure. There she opted to devote herself exclusively to Chinese studies which she also pursued at Oxford, Cambridge, and Fudan University in Shanghai. She has ever since been involved in teaching and research on the intellectual history of China, and Confucianism in particular, initially at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), then at INALCO (National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations), before her appointment to the Institut universitaire de France and her election to the Collège de France in 2008 where she holds the Chair of Chinese intellectual history.

She has written a French translation of the 'Analects of Confucius' (Entretiens de Confucius), a 'Study on Confucian Exegesis in the Early Imperial Era', and a 'History of Chinese Thought'. 

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the first two volumes of The Ibis Trilogy; Sea of Poppies, and River of Smoke.
The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.

Gal Gvili is a Lecturer in Discipline at Columbia University. She received her B.A and M.A from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and her PhD in Modern Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University in 2015. Gvili researches and teaches in early modern, modern, and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese cinema of all periods, and literary and cultural theory.Her current research, entitled "The Invention of Sympathy: Realism, Religion and Resonance in Modern Chinese Literature" explores how literary realism became the vehicle for achieving national salvation from Western imperialism in Republican China (1911–1949). Her publications include “Pan-Asian Poetics: Tagore and the Interpersonal in May 4th New Poetry” (forthcoming) Journal of Asian Studies. “Ling yi zhong xieshizhuyi: Mao Dun yu youtai zongjiao, ziranzhuyi ji shengming wenti”(Alternative Realism: Judaism, Naturalism and the Question of Life in the Writings of Mao Dun). Han Yuyan Wenxue Yanjiu 2012, 3(1): 19–28;  “Lu Xun wai wen cang shu ti yao: hei nü qiu shen ji” (Lu Xun Foreign Books Catalogue: The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God) Lu xun yan jiu yue kan  2012, 3: 8–10.

Engseng Ho is Professor of cultural anthropology and history at Duke University and Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor at National University of Singapore. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy.
After graduating from Stanford with undergraduate degrees in economics and anthropology, Ho spent a few years as an international economist in Singapore before pursuing a masters and PhD at the University of Chicago. His dissertation on a society of Yemeni people that had a 500-year history of migration broke the mold of a traditional anthropology program that focuses on the study of contemporary society in one geographic locality. He spent two years in Yemen conducting research that revealed a rich history of a people who traveled throughout East Africa, the Arab world, India and Southeast Asia, intermarrying and contributing to the establishment of new Muslim religious, political and legal institutions. The dissertation grew into a book: The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean(University of California Press, 2006). He is currently interested in the international and transcultural dimensions of Islamic society across the Indian Ocean, and its relations to western empires. Ho also has conducted research in Saudi Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia.

Tzu-hui Celina Hung is Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU Shanghai. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, she was a visiting assistant professor and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught for the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Comparative Literature. Hung’s research interests include modern Chinese and Sinophone studies, Asian migration and diaspora, Anglophone literature, Southeast Asian studies, and the discourses of creolization versus multiculturalism. Her current book project studies the multilingual articulations of creolization by Peranakan writers and educators of various Chinese descents at the turn of the twentieth century and here onward, amid a changing nexus of political forces and cultural resources at home and abroad. 

Hyeju Janice Jeong is a Ph.D Candidate at Duke University History Department. Her dissertation explores ways through which Chinese-Muslim communal leaders dispersed in between Shanghai, Taipei and Mecca directed flows of endowments and re-configured transmitted historiographical narratives to build trans-local networks between China/Taiwan and Arabia throughout the twentieth century, combining different strands of internationalisms and religious doctrines to their benefit. The study thus aims to bring together religion, politics, and socio-cultural constellations within a strand of overlapping diasporas, to shed a historical (but new) light on the critical mediators of Sino-Arabian/Islamic relations. Ms. Jeong is currently affiliated with the Peking University Arabic Department and the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai for her field research.

Ravinder Kaur is Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies in the Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is currently engaged in two long-term research projects. The first focuses on post-reform India’s transition into an attractive ‘emerging market’ in the global political economy, and second, explores the yet unfolding connections between Asia and Africa via a study of new business connections between India, China and Ethiopia. She is the Primary Investigator of two major projects ‘Nation in Motion: Globalization, Governance and Development in New India’ (2010-2015) and ‘Emerging Worlds: Explorations of New South-South Connections’ (2014-2018). Her previous research focused on the questions of forced migration, refugee resettlement, social class and caste and the making of modern citizenship during India’s Partition in 1947. She is the author of Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (Oxford, 2007), editor of Religion, Violence and Political Mobilization in South Asia (Sage, 2005), co-editor of ‘Governing Difference: Identity, Inequity and Inequality in India and China’, Special Issue, Third World Quarterly (2012), co-editor of ‘Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital, Novelty in post-reform India’, Journal Special Issue, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (2016), and most recently, co-editor of ‘Social Mobility in Post-reform India’, Journal Special Issue, Contemporary South Asia (2016).

Li Min is a Researcher at South Asia Institute of Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences. She graudated from Yunnan University, getting Bachelor of Arts degree in 2003 and Master of history degree in 2006. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate of Nanjing University. Her research interests are United States foreign policy to South Asia. Relevant articles in recent years: 'An Analysis of the Situation in Afghanistan: States Quo and Prospects', in Contemporary International Relations, Feb.2015;  'Anti-Americanism in Pakistan and Its Effects', in International Forum, Sep.2015; 'Afghan Hazaras’ Historical Circumstance and Current Situation: From the Fringe to the Center', in Indian Ocean Economic and Political Review, Oct.2014.

Liu Yi, Ph.D in Religious Studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now Associate Professor in Department of History and Deputy Director of Center for Turkish Studies, Shanghai University. In the 2010-11 academic year, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. From 2013 to 2016, he acted as the Chinese Director of Confucius Institute at Boğazici University, Istanbul and studied the Turkish language. His research and teaching interests focus on history of religion and comparative religions (Christianity, Islam and Confucianism), religion and globalization, religion and violence, etc. He is author of Religion and Politics in a Global Context (Shanghai, 2011) and Globalization, Public Religions, and Secularism: A Comparative Study of Christianity and Islam (Shanghai, 2013), as well as academic articles both in Chinese and English. He also co-edited the Blue Book of Turkey and Religion & History series. 

Adhira Mangalagiri is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is currently completing her dissertation, titled 'The World Within: Reading Colonial Literary Encounters between China and India,' as a Dissertation Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. 'The World Within' conducts theoretically-engaged readings of early twentieth-century Chinese and Hindi texts, uncovering the generative potential and aesthetic valence of colonial violence in crafting China-India literary dialogue. In 2015, she received the American Comparative Literature Association’s (ACLA) Horst Frenz Prize for her paper, 'Worlding Theory: Language as a New Possibility in Literary Theory' (forthcoming in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature). She currently serves as Graduate Student Representative on the ACLA advisory board.

Lei Ping is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the New School University and Research Fellow at India China Institute. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on contemporary Chinese cities and cultural politics, urban land policies in socialist and post-socialist economic development, as well as middle class and consumption of space in China and India. She has written on the everyday life and the socialist project of “remolding” the Shanghai national bourgeoisie in the Mao era. She is particularly interested in the question of the formation, discourse of struggle, and the socio-political role of the middle classes in Chinese and Indian creative economies, and the shifting tensions and relations between the middle classes and the state apparatus in the post-Mao and post-liberalization eras in China and India. Her recent fieldwork engages research topics such as spatial consumption, life-styles, and pastime of the middle classes in the emerging creative economies in Shanghai and New Delhi. Her forthcoming book is titled as 'Figures of Capital in Post-1949 Shanghai.'

Tansen Sen is Professor of history at Baruch College, City University of New York, USA. Currently, he is a Visiting Professor and the Director of the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai, China. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2003) and co-author (with Victor H. Mair) of Traditional China in Asian and World History (Association for Asian Studies, 2012). He has edited Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Cultural and Intellectual Exchange (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014). He is completing a monograph entitled India, China, and the World: Networks of Exchange and Interactions and working on a book about Zheng He’s maritime expeditions. He serves on the Governing Board of the Nalanda University, India.

Mark Swislocki is Associate Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is a cultural historian specializing in Chinese history. His work examines such topics as the importance of food culture to urbanization, cultural factors shaping ideas about healthy eating, and the role of human-animal relations in the formation of human communities and cross-cultural or international relations.
Swislocki is the author of Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai (Stanford, 2009) and articles on the history of nutrition and human-animal relations.
He is currently conducting research for a book on the environmental history of Yunnan, titled The East is Green: The Political Jurisdiction of Nature in Southwest China.
Swislocki is the recipient of grants from the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Enhancement Fund (July-December 2011), the American Council of Learned Societies (Fellowship for American Research in the Humanities in China, 2011), Brown University Cogut Center For the Humanities (Faculty Fellowship, 2007-2008), Giles Whiting Foundation (Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, 2000-2001), the Stanford Humanities Center (Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellowship, 1999-2000), and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China (Dissertation Research Fellowship, administered by the ACLS, 1998-1999).

Brian Tsui is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.  A historian of modern China, Brian is interested in the intersection between conservatism, revolutionary politics and the mobilization of cultures in the Republican period. His book manuscript 'China's Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927-49' explores the Nationalist government's mass politics, Pan-Asianism and courtship of liberal intellectuals. He is working on a collaborative project, funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, titled "Beyond Pan-Asianism: China-India Connections, 1911-1949."

Professor Vakulabharanam is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Previously, he taught at the University of Hyderabad (2008-14) and the City University of New York (2004-08). He was a grantee at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET, NY) between 2011 and 2014 on a project titled, ‘Economic Development and Inequality: What Can the Asian Experience Teach Us?’ He was a Fellow of the India China Institute of the New School (NY) between 2008 and 2010. He has worked on issues pertaining to agrarian change in the context of globalization in developing economies, agrarian cooperatives, and the relationship between economic development and inequality. His recent research focuses on inequality in the contemporary Asian economies, including India and China.

Joanna Waley-Cohen is the Provost for NYU Shanghai and Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University, where she has taught Chinese history since 1992. As Provost, she serves as NYU Shanghai’s chief academic officer, setting the university’s academic strategy and priorities, and overseeing academic appointments, research, and faculty affairs.
Her research interests include early modern Chinese history; China and the West; and Chinese imperial culture, especially in the Qianlong era.
She has received many honors, including archival and postdoctoral fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies; Goddard and Presidential Fellowships from NYU; and an Olin
Fellowship in Military and Strategic History from Yale.
Waley-Cohen's books include The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty (I.B. Tauris, 2006); The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (W.W. Norton, 1999); and Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758-1820 (Yale University Press, 1991).  Her current scholarly projects include a revised history of imperialism in China, a study of daily life in China c.1800, and a history of culinary culture in early modern China.

Dr. Wasana Wongsurawat is assistant professor in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her area of expertise is the history of modern China, the Chinese Diaspora, transnational and global history. She was the co-editor of Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). Among her latest publications is the article, 'Beyond Jews of the Orient: A New Interpretation of the Problematic Relationship between the Thai State and its Ethnic Chinese Community'.