Kanchan Chandra is Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. She joined the NYU faculty in 2005 after four years on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Since earning her Ph.D. in government at Harvard University (2000), she has established herself as a leader in her field and an innovative and energetic researcher. Her first book, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Headcounts in India (Cambridge UP, 2004), was hailed as a landmark study, combining theory and empirical analysis to examine why people choose to vote on the basis of one ethnic identity when alternatives are available, and the effects of that choice. A second book, Constructivist Theories of Politics, is forthcoming in 2012 by Oxford University Press. This book develops a new conceptual framework for thinking about how ethnic identities change and incorporates that framework into theorie of politics and economics. themes introduced in this book have also informed many of her articles, including “Cumulative Findings in the Study of Ethnic Politics,” APSA-CP, 12, No. 1 (2001); “Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability,” Perspectives on Politics, 3, No. 2 (2005); and “What is Ethnic Identity and Does it Matter?” Annual Review of Political Science, 9 (2006). During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, she will be working on her next book, on the subject of ethnic diversity and democracy.

Ms. Chandra’s many honors include Fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation, and her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace.

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Research Interests:
Feminist movements, gender studies, sectarian violence, Medical Anthropology, post-Colonial and post-Structural theory; South Asia, Europe

Summary of Research Activities: The abiding concerns of my research have been to understand the working of long time cultural logics in contemporary events as well as moments of rupture and recovery. My first book showed how one may address this through an examination of texts produced in local communities in which myth and history were embedded in each other. I have often learnt from ancient, medieval and contemporary texts in Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali and Urdu either by posing these as interlocutors to some contemporary anthropological concerns or taking their voices on lease in order to traverse a different genealogy of the problem.

In recent years I have worked intensively on questions of violence, social suffering. and subjectivity. My interest in these questions stems from questions on the institutional processes through which violence and suffering are produced as well as from questions on what it is to produce testimony to these events and to oneself. If societies hide from themselves the pain which is inflicted upon individuals as prices of belonging, then how do social sciences learn to receive this knowledge? I have tried to see the intricate relations between biography, autobiography and ethnography to frame many of these questions.

Currently I am working on a project on burden of disease and health seeking behavior among the urban poor in Delhi. This work is being done in collaboration with colleagues from the disciplines of Economics and the Health Sciences in addition to anthropologists and sociologists. The collaborating institution in Delhi is the Institute of Socio-Economic Research in Development and Democracy. Presently we are trying to create a panel data for 250 households which tracks the relation between local ecology, health and family processes of decision making.

Major Publications:

• “Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual”, Oxford University Press, 1977, 1982,1990, 1992, 1995, 1998.
• “The Word and the World: Fantasy Symbol and Record”, Sage Publications, 1986 (Ed.)
• “Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia”, Oxford, 1990, (Ed.) (Reissued in 1992, 1994).
• “Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India”, Oxford University Press, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000.
• “Social Suffering”, Special Issue of Daedalus (edited in collaboration with Arthur Kleinman and Margaret Lock). Winter, 1996. Also published as “Social Suffering”, University of California Press, 1998 and Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998.
• “Violence and Subjectivity” (co-edited), University of California Press, 2000.
• “Social Science and Immunization” (co-edited). Economic and Political Weekly. Special Issue, February 2000.

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Miriam Golden is Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she teaches comparative politics, and for the 2011-12 academic year Visiting Senior Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Golden’s research interests center on problems of political accountability. She is working on a large project that compares the electoral underpinnings of political corruption in poor and wealthy democracies. Her work on this topic has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Economics & Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies. Between 1995 and 2000, she served as the Editor of the Newsletter of the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Organized Section in Comparative Politics, and between 2000 and 2004, she was the Founding Director of the Center for Comparative and Global Research, housed in UCLA’s International Institute. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the International Growth Centre, and the Governments of Quebec and Canada.

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This talk will be given at the MIT Center for International Studies

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T.V. PAUL is Director (Founding) of the McGill University/Université de Montreal Centre for International Peace and Security Studies (CIPSS) and James McGill Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where he has been teaching since 1991. Paul specializes in International Relations, especially international security, regional security and South Asia. He received his undergraduate education from Kerala University, India; M.Phil in International Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Paul is the author or editor of 13 books. He has also published over 45 journal articles and book chapters and has lectured at universities and research institutions internationally. His authored books are: Globalization and the National Security State (with Norrin Ripsman), (Oxford University Press, 2010); The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2009); India in the World Order: Searching for Major Power Status (Cambridge University Press, 2002, with Baldev Nayar); Power versus Prudence: Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); and Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Paul is the editor or co-editor of the volumes: International Relations Theory and Regional Transformation (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2012); South Asia’s Weak States: Understanding the Regional Insecurity Predicament (Stanford University Press, 2010); Complex Deterrence: Strategy In the Global Age (with Patrick M. Morgan and James J. Wirtz, University of Chicago Press, 2009); The India-Pakistan Conflict: An Enduring Rivalry (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century (with James Wirtz and Michel Fortmann, Stanford University Press, 2004); The Nation-State in Question (with G. John Ikenberry and John A. Hall, Princeton University Press, 2003); International Order and the Future of World Politics (with John A. Hall, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 2000 (twice), 2001, 2002 & 2003); and The Absolute Weapon Revisited: Nuclear Arms and the Emerging International Order (with Richard Harknett and James Wirtz, University of Michigan Press, 1998 & 2000). He serves as the editor of the Georgetown University Press book series: South Asia in World Affairs.