Faculty Biographies

Faculty

Duke University

Aravamudan | Arichea | Chatterji | Ewald | Freeman | Ho | Horowitz | Jaffe | R. Khanna | Krishna | Lawrence | Majumder | Moosa | Need | Pfaff | Puri | Purohit | Ramaswamy | A.Shah | P.Shah | Tham | Weinthal

Srinivas Aravamudan joined the Duke English Department in the Fall of 2000. He specializes in eighteenth century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory. He is the author of essays in Diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Anthropological Forum, South Atlantic Quarterly and other venues. He is working on two book-length studies, one on the eighteenth-century French and British oriental tale, and the other on sovereignty and anachronism. His edition of William Earle's antislavery romance, entitled Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack appeared in 2005 with Broadview Press.

Bishop Arichea is bishop in residence at Duke Divinity School and Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines where he also serves as professor of New Testament. He began his ministry by serving pastorates in Bataan and Manila in the Philippines and teaching for eight years at Union Theological Seminary. In 1987 he was moved to Hong Kong to become the Asia-Pacific regional translation coordinator, a position he held for eight years before he was elected to the episcopacy (in absentia) in November 1994. As bishop, he was assigned to the Baguio Episcopal Area in the Philippines. He retired from the episcopacy in December 2000. While with the Bible Society, he co-authored four handbooks for translators (Galatians, 1 Peter, Jude and 2 Peter , and the Pastoral Letters) in addition to writing numerous articles on Bible translation, most of which were published in The Bible Translator.

Aaron k. Chatterji is an associate professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He is currently on leave at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in Washington. His work investigates some of the most important forces shaping our global economy and society: entrepreneurship, innovation, and the expanding social mission of business. Aaron is especially interested in the fluid boundaries between government and business, and how public policies interact with the activities of responsible companies, social entrepreneurs, and creative customers. He is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, The Health Sector Management Program, and the Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University. His work has been cited by various media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The New Republic.

Janet J. Ewald: American Council for Learned Societies; Carter G. Woodson Institute Fellow; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow; National Humanities Center Fellow; American Institutes for Yemeni Studies fellowship for research in Yemen; Trent Foundation; American Philosophical Society; various awards for developing courses in Atlantic and Indian Ocean history. Her specialty is the history of Africa. Her first book is Soldiers, Traders, and Slaves: State Formation and Economic Transformation in the Greater Nile Valley, 1700-1885. She has now embarked on a second major project, "Motley Crews: Indian and African Seafarers on English Vessels in the Indian Ocean, c. 1600-1900."

Rich Freeman is a cultural anthropologist with a background in Sanskrit, Indian religion and philosophies, and Dravidian languages. With primary interest as a field anthropologist in the culture, language, and history of Kerala, his interests include folklore, classical Sanskrit and Dravidian languages and literatures, Hinduism, semiotics, and linguistic anthropology.

Engseng Ho is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History at Duke University. Professor Ho is in residence at Duke effective fall 2009. He joined the Duke faculty in 2008 but spent AY 2008-2009 on research leave. Ho was educated at Stanford University in Economics and Social Sciences, and at the University of Chicago in Anthropology. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy. He is currently interested in the international and transcultural dimensions of Islamic society across the Indian Ocean, and its relations to western empires. Ho has conducted research in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, India, and Southeast Asia. His book The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, is published by the University of California Press, in the California World History Libra.

Donald L. Horowitz is the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University. He is the author of six books.Professor Horowitz has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and at the Central European University and a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, at the Law Faculty of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and at Universiti Kebangsaan in Malaysia. In 2001, he was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and in 2001-02, he was a Carnegie Scholar. Professor Horowitz is currently writing a book about constitutional design, particularly for divided societies. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, he served as President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy from 2007 to 2010.

Richard Jaffe is an associate professor at the Religion department of Duke University. Hi research centers on the development of Japanese Buddhism from the sixteenth century to the present. Current projects include a study of travel and encounters between Japanese and other Buddhists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and overseeing, as general editor, the publication of five volumes of the writings of D. T. Suzuki.

Ranjana Khanna is Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies and Professor of English, Women's Studies, and the Literature Program at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, and Film, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory. She has published widely on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and feminist theory, literature, and film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (Stanford University Press, 2008.) She has published in journals like Differences, Signs, Third Text, Diacritics, Screen, Art History. Her current book manuscript in progress is called: Asylum: The Concept and the Practice.

Anirudh Krishna is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University.For the past seven years, he has been examining poverty dynamics at the household level, tracking movements into and out of poverty of over 35,000 households in a varied group of nearly 400 communities of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru and North Carolina, USA. He has published more than forty journal articles and book chapters. Before turning to academia, Krishna worked for 14 years in the Indian Administrative Service, where he managed diverse initiatives related to rural and urban development.

Bruce Lawrence is a Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion, in the Department of Religion. Lawrence received his PhD from Yale University in 1972 and has since become an expert on institutional Sufism, contemporary Muslim movements, Abrahamic pluralism, and minority citizenship. He has conducted research in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Asia and North Africa. At Duke, he has taught Islamic Civilization (Fall & Spring), Indo-Persian Sufism, Islam and Modernism, Muslim Networks, The Qur’an over Time, and Osama bin Laden in the Muslim Cultures Focus Program.

Pranab Majumder joined the Fuqua School of Business as Assistant Professor of Operations Management after finishing his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 2001. Professor Majumder's research interests cover the area of Operations Strategy, specifically in large-scale supply chains, and remanufacturing.

Ebrahim E.I. Moosa is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religion. His interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. Dr Moosa is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion's Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006) and editor of the last manuscript of the late Professor Fazlur Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism. He contributes regularly to the op-ed pages of the New York Times, Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Boston Review and several international publications. Currently he is completing a book titled Muslim Self Revived: Ethics, Rights and Technology after Empire. Dr. Moosa serves on several distinguished international advisory boards. He has received grants from the Ford Foundation to research contemporary Muslim ethics and issues of philanthropy in the Muslim world.

David Need is a Visiting Instructor, Department of Religion and the Department of International Comparative Studies. In 2004, Need received his PhD in History of Religions from the University of Virginia. His areas of expertise are poetry, imagination, language, and religion. At Duke Need has taught Religion 45: Religions of Asia, Russian 118S: Islam and Orthodoxy, and Religion 186S: Poetry, Desire and Religion.

Alexander Pfaff is the Associate Professor of Public Policy, Economics and Environment and an environmental-and-natural-resources economist focused upon how economic development and the environment & natural resources affect each other. His research examines: impacts on deforestation of roads, protected areas and ecopayments (Brazil's Amazon, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico and US); influences on harmful exposures (stove emissions in China and Pakistan, drinking arsenic in Bangladesh); responses to climate and water shocks in production and bargaining under water policies (Brazil's NE and Colombia); and how U.S. regulators might shift the incentives for firms to audit and provide information.

Manju Puri is the J. B. Fuqua Professor of Finance at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. She was earlier Associate Professor of Finance at Stanford Business School, which she joined after earning her Ph.D in finance at New York University. Professor Puri has been an executive and consultant in the banking industry, and is a leading scholar in banking and venture capital. Her research interests are in the area of empirical corporate finance and financial intermediation, with focus on commercial banks, investment banks, venture capital and entrepreneurship.

Debu Purohit is Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, and served as the Associate Dean of the Cross Continent Program. Previously, he was on the faculty of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published extensively in journals such as Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Marketing Research. His teaching and research interests are in marketing high technology products and marketing strategy. He teaches a second year elective on Marketing of High technology in the MBA program. He has been involved in executive education programs at Duke as well as the University of California, Berkeley.

Sumathi Ramaswamy (History) is a cultural historian of South Asia and the British empire with an interest in visual studies, the history of cartography, and gender. She is currently working on two different book-projects:1) Global Itineraries: The Indian Travels of a Worldly Object, explores the debates in colonial India about the shape and disposition of the earth in the universe and examines the course of science education in modern South Asia; 2) Giving and Learning: Philanthropy and Higher Education in Modern India, charts the ethical and political impulses that directed new patterns of giving directed towards the establishment of colleges and universities across colonial India.

Ami V. Shah is a TWP lecturing fellow at Duke University. Her thematic interests are Ethnicity/Identity, Urban Space, Municipal Development, Migration, Informal Economy, Identity Politics/Violence. Regional Specialties: South Asia (Gujarat, India), and West Africa (Nigeria).

Purnima Shah is an Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke Dance Program. Her area of specialization is India. Research specialty: Performance Studies, Dance Ethnography, Dance and Theatre of India - Dance-theatre and Religion, Gender Performance in Dance and Theatre.

Joseph Tham is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University and the Duke Center for International Development (DCID). Dr. Tham is a social sector economist, especially interested in the application of cost benefit analysis to health, education and related social sectors. His main research interests are cost benefit analysis, broadly defined, as well as applied risk analysis and econometric forecasting models. He has been working on the improvement of infrastructure investments in the public sector and is currently examining the issue of market-based tariff regulation in the power sector in developing countries. At Duke University and developing countries around the world, Dr. Tham workshops on project appraisal and empirical analysis for economic development. He taught a course on Cash Flow Valuation in 2005.

Erika Weinthal specializes in global environmental politics and natural resource policies with a particular emphasis on water and energy. The main focus of her research is on the origins and effects of environmental institutions. Her previous research examined the impact of multilateral and bilateral development organizations on water resource management and institution building in the Aral Sea basin in Central Asia. Her research on water politics in conflict regions (e.g. the Gaza Strip in the Middle East) focuses on how the environment might be harnessed for peace building. Her current book project on the resource curse explicates the links between a countrys natural resource base and its institutional capacity through systematically comparing the energy-rich Soviet successor states with other energy-rich developing countries.

UNC

Akin | Bentley | Ernst | Ghosh | Leve | Pearce | Smith | Taj

John S. Akin, Austin H. Carr Distinguished Professor is a specialist in Health Economics, with a teaching and research focus on developing country health systems. He has organized his research agenda around the design and evaluation of public programs in the education, population, and health areas. His research deals mainly with health system finance, and demand and supply of health services in low income countries. He is one of the initiators and present investigators of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). Dr. Akin has done extensive service at national, university and developmental levels, including such activities as testifying before Congress, helping to organize the annual Technical Session of the World Health Organization, presenting at he plenary lecture at the World Federation of Public Health Associations, serving as a trustee of the Southern Economics Association, and serving as Chair of the UNC Economics Department.

Margaret Bentley is a Professor at the Department of Nutrition of UNC as well as the Associate Dean of Office of Global Health. She teaches interdisciplinary Perspectives in Global Health. Dr. Bentley’s research focuses on women and infant's nutrition, infant and young child feeding, behavioral research on sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, and community-based interventions for nutrition and health. She currently is working on an HIV behavioral intervention prevention trial. As Associate Dean for Global Health, Peggy Bentley is responsible for developing a comprehensive fundraising and strategic planning program for global health in the School of Public Health. Margaret represents UNC on the Global Health Committee of the Association of Schools of Public Health.

Carl W. Ernst is a specialist in Islamic studies, with a focus on West and South Asia. His published research, based on the study of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, has been mainly devoted to the study of Islam and Sufism. His book Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (UNC Press, 2003) has received several international awards. His publications include Sufi Martyrs of Love: Chishti Sufism in South Asia and Beyond (co-authored with Bruce Lawrence, 2002); Teachings of Sufism (1999); a translation of The Unveiling of Secrets: Diary of a Sufi Master by Ruzbihan Baqli (1997);Guide to Sufism (1997); Ruzbihan Baqli: Mystical Experience and the Rhetoric of Sainthood in Persian Sufism (1996); Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (1993); and Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (1985).

Pika Ghosh teaches courses on South Asian art, architecture, and culture, and her research focuses on material culture in eastern India from the seventeenth century to the present. Her book: Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal .Currently she is working on the terra cotta ornamentation on Bengal temples and the role of visual imagery in a predominantly oral culture. A second project focuses on the narrative scrolls painted by itinerant painter-minstrels called patuas to entertain rural audiences. Her courses involve close study of works of art in the Ackland Art Museum and her graduate students have created a catalogue of the South Asian sculptures in that collection.

Lauren G. Leve is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UNC. Her fields of specialization are Religions of Asia; Religion and Culture. Lauren`s research interests are Ethnographic methods and the ethnography of religion; Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia; personhood and identity; gender and feminist theory; globalism, nationalism, and postcoloniality; anthropology of religion; religions of South Asia and Nepal

Lisa Pearce, Associate Professor of Sociology at UNC, is a sociologist and demographer who primarily studies how religion shapes family formation, relationships, adolescent self-image, aspirations, and achievement. With ongoing research set in both the U.S. and Nepal, her current work in Nepal focuses on how religion is related to family formation and links between household-level population dynamics and environmental consumption. Pearce conducts research with a mix of survey and ethnographic methods.

Sara H. Smith is a feminist political geographer interested in the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. In my research, she seeks to understand how political and geopolitical conflict is constituted or disrupted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth. Since 2004, her research has engaged with the politics of marriage and fertility in Ladakh’s Leh District. This research explores the territorial logic manifest in a pro-natal campaign and a ban on religious intermarriage, as well as the ways that people cope with such territorial logic. Her research has included survey work and interviews, as well as oral history and photography projects with Ladakhi youth.

Afroz Taj is an Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill. He has been teaching university level Hindi and Urdu since 1983, first at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and then at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville). In 1995 he came to UNC and NCSU to establish a pioneering program of teaching Hindi-Urdu through interactive televideo. His research interests include Hindi-Urdu poetry and poetics, Indian drama and musical theater, and the Indian cinema. Originally from District Etah, Uttar Pradesh, Afroz did his undergraduate and master's degrees from Aligarh Muslim University, and his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.