SAP has more than 50 core and affiliated faculty from across Cornell’s colleges and schools, working in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. SAP faculty and language instructors offer classes in Bengali, Hindi, Nepali, Pali, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sinhala, Tamil, Tibetan, and Urdu.
The SAP steering committee provides internal faculty leadership from SAP's core faculty, collaborating with the director to set goals and priorities for SAP and to develop innovative programming and curricula related to South Asia.
The SAP advisory council is composed largely of persons based outside Cornell. With the aim of making our governance structure more global, the advisory council ensures that SAP fulfills its intellectual and educational mission in a rapidly changing international context.
SAP hosts visiting scholars from South Asia and elsewhere, including Fulbright fellows, our own South Asian Studies fellows, and other scholars, writers, and artists, who collaborate with Cornell faculty and students on South Asia Program activities.
SAP awards Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to outstanding students pursuing South Asian language and area studies. The U.S. Department of Education allocates these highly competitive four-year grants to SAP in recognition of our world-class language and area study program.
SAP staff have years of combined experience working in international studies, and they play an active role in enhancing the world's knowledge about South Asia.
Rohan Murty is a technology entrepreneur. He holds a PhD in computer science from Harvard and a BS from Cornell. His dissertation work on white spaces networking was seminal in opening up a new area of research.
Malavika Narayan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her research is based in Delhi and focuses on the emergence, evolution and persistence of particular geographies of urban informal work.
Vishal is interested in protected areas, traditional knowledge and the relations that make these categories possible in contemporary South Asia. They have previously received a BA in Anthropology from The George Washington University.
Thomas Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
Geographic Research Area: India, China, and other emerging markets
Teaching/Research Interests: Macroeconomics of financial globalization, financial regulation, and monetary policy frameworks and exchange rate policies in emerging markets
