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FACULTY

John Emigh

John Emigh, Professor of Theater, Speech and Dance, and of English, has taught at Brown since 1967. Though his research encompasses the theatrical performance and ritual of diverse regions, his research trips to Asia have focused on the court fools and street jesters of Rajasthan, the use of masks theatrically in Eastern India, and the changing dynamics of performance in Bali. His most recently published book, Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theater, was printed by University of Pennsylvania Press and examines aspects of masked performance both in India and Southeast Asia. He prepared a museum exhibit for the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts entitled ‘Masks from Different States of India’ in 2001,and his film ‘Hajari Band: Jester without a Court’ focuses on the life of a Rajasthani street performer. Current projects relating to South Asia include a book-length study of “Prahlada Naka” – a devotional theater form in Orissa, India.

Professor Emigh is an artist as well as a researcher and has acted with Balinese artists and performed one man shows using Balinese techniques all over the United States and India. His class ‘Non-Western Theater and Performance’ allows students to explore the use of masks and touches on both Indian and Sri Lankan performance and ritual.

Selected Publications

Entries on "I Nyman Kakul," "Topeng," and "Prahlada Nataka." In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Performance, Oxford Univ. Press, 2004

Entries on "Masks of South Asia," "Bahurupiahs," "Bhand Pather," "Prahlada Nataka," "Danda Nata" and "Bharat Lila" for The Encyclopedia of South Asian Folklore, ed. Peter Claus. New York: Garland Publishing, 2002.

"Hybridity and the Uses of Adversity: Culture and Crisis in the Prahlada Nataka of Orissa," Seagull Theatre Magazine, Calcutta, XXXI, September, 2001

"The Mask in Asian Theater: Ritual and Entertainment." In John W. Nunley and Cara MaCary, eds., Masks: Faces of Culture. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the St. Louis Art Museum, 1999, pp. 209-229, 325-327.

Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1996

"Gender Bending in Balinese Performance" (with Jamer Hunt). In Laurence Senelick, ed. Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts. Hanover, NH: New England University Press, 1992, pp. 195-222.

"The Domains of Topeng." In Art and Politics in Southeast Asia, Six Perspectives: Papers from the Distinguished Scholars Series, ed. Robert Van Neil, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Center for Southeast Asian Studies,1990, pp. 65-96.

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John Emigh

Professor
Theatre, Speech and Dance

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Andrew Foster

Andrew Foster, Professor of Economics and Community Health and a research investigator for the Population Studies and Training Center, is a specialist in empirical microeconomics and has worked in a variety of population-related fields of economics, including health, development, environment, public, and labor. Most recently, these interests have led him to work on issues pertaining to population and environment in South Asia.

Foster is currently working on two projects with collaborator M.R. Rosenzweig of Yale University: one on groundwater management in India and the other examining possible mechanisms for a reversal in forest cover declines in India during the 1980s and early 1990s, using a 30-year panel representative sample of rural India, which they designed and implemented as part of a 10-year funded project (NIH, Worldbank) examining economic growth in rural India. He is also pursuing work on a third project, also funded by the NIH, with Naresh Kumar of the University of Iowa on the consequences of recent court-induced policy interventions that have had a marked impact on air quality in Delhi, India.

Selected Publications

A.D. Foster and M.R. Rosenzweig, "Agricultural Productivity Growth, Rural Economic Diversity, and Economic Reforms: India, 1970-2000" Economic Development and Cultural Change, 52(3), 2004.

A.D. Foster and M.R. Rosenzweig, "Technological Change and the Distribution of Schooling: Evidence from Green-Revolution India" Journal of Development Economics, 74(1):87-111, 2004.

A.D. Foster and M.R. Rosenzweig, Economic Growth and the Rise of Forests. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(2): 601-637, 2003.

A.D. Foster and M.R. Rosenzweig, "Does Economic Growth Increase the Demand for Schools? Evidence from Rural India, 1960-2000," Chapter 8 in A. O. Krueger, ed., Economic Policy Reforms and the Indian Economy, University of Chicago Press, 2002

J. Behrman, A.D. Foster, M.R. Rosenzweig and P. Vashishtha "Women's Schooling, Home Teaching, and Economic Growth", August 1999, Journal of Political Economy, 682-714

J. Behrman, A.D. Foster and M.R. Rosenzweig, AThe Dynamics of Agricultural Production and the Calorie-Income Relationship: Evidence from Pakistan", Journal of Econometrics, 77: 187-207, 1997

A.D. Foster, "Prices, Credit Constraints, and Child Growth in Rural Bangladesh", Economic Journal, 105(430): 551-570, May 1995

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Andrew Foster

Professor
Economics and Community Health

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Lina Fruzzetti

Lina Fruzzetti, Professor of Anthropology, specializes within social anthropology on the relationship between kinship, ritual and meaning in the construction of gender in India. Her research in Bengal has resulted in the publication of numerous books including her most recent, Culture, Power and Agency: Gender in Indian Ethnography, published by Stree Press in Calcutta and written in collaboration with Sirpa Tenhunen.

Her interest in visual anthropology has led her to develop several courses, including one specifically about Bollywood cinema. She has also co-directed four documentary films, the most recent of which, entitled ‘Singing Pictures: Women Painters of Naya’, focused on the daily lives of the members of a scroll-painting collaborative formed by a group of women painters in the village of Naya in West Bengal. The film received the Material Culture and Archaeology film prize from the Royal Institute of Anthropology and was screened at Brown in October of 2005 with three of the artists featured in the film present.

Currently, Professor Fruzzetti is exploring the dynamics of inter-caste and inter-religious marriage and gender through interviews with both men and women, looking specifically at how women articulate their choices and from where they derive their sense of power. She is also working on an ethnography of the town in Bengal in which she has conducted the bulk of her research of the last thirty-five years.

Selected Publications

Fruzzetti, L., and Tenhunen, Sirpa (eds), 2006. Culture, Power and Agency: Gender in Indian Ethnography. STREE , Calcutta , India.

Fruzzetti, L., Ostor, A. 2003. Calcutta Conversations. Delhi: Chronicle Books

Fruzzetti, L., and Perez, Rosa Maria. 2002. The Gender of the Nation: Allegoric Femininity and Women's Status in Bengal and Goa. Ethnographica 6, 1 (Lisbon , ISCTE).

Fruzzetti, L . 1998. Women Orphans, and Poverty: Social Movements and Ideologies of Work in India. Quebec: World Heritage Press.

Fruzzetti, L. 1993. 3rd reprint. [1982]. The Gift of a Virgin: Women, Marriage Ritual and Kinship in Bengali Society. New Introduction. Delhi: Oxford University Press; 1982, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Ostor, A., Fruzzetti, L. and Barnett, S. 1992 second reprint. Concepts of Person: Kinship, Marriage, and Caste in India. New Introduction. Delhi: Oxford University.

Fruzzetti, L., Ostor, A. 1984. Kinship and Ritual in Bengal: Anthropological Essays. New Delhi : South Asian Press

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Lina Fruzzetti

Professor
Anthropology

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Patrick Heller

Patrick Heller, Associate Professor of Sociology, studies development, political sociology, and comparative political economy. He is interested in the quality, variation and substance of democracy and is the author of The Labor of Development (Cornell University Press, 1999) which examines the role of subordinate classes in the transformation to capitalism in the Indian state of Kerala. He has written on a range of topics on India, including democratic consolidation, the politics of economic transformation, social capital and social movements.

Selected Publications

2005. “Reinventing Public Power in the Age of Globalization: the Transformation of Movement Politics in Kerala,” in Raka Ray and Mary Katzenstein (eds.), Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power and Politics. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

2003. (with T.M. Thomas Isaac) “Democracy and Development: Decentralized Planning in Kerala,” in Archon Fung and Erik O. Wright (eds.), Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Democracy. London, Verso Press.

2002. (with T.M. Thomas Isaac) “O perfil politico e institucional da democracia participativa: licoes de Kerala, India,” pp. 601-645 in Boaventura de Sousa Santos (ed.), Democratizar a Democracia: Os Caminhos Da Democracia Participativa. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacao Brasileira.

2000. “Social Capital and the Developmental State: Industrial Workers in Kerala,” pp. 66-87 in Govindan Parayil (ed.), Kerala: the Development Experience. London: Zed Books. (Modified version of “Social Capital as Product of Class Mobilization and State Intervention: Industrial Workers in Kerala, India,” pp. 1055-1071, World Development 24:6, June, 1996).

1999. The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India. Cornell University Press.

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Patrick Heller

Associate Professor
Sociology

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Ashok Koul

Ashok Koul, Senior Lecturer in Language Studies, has been teaching both Hindi and Urdu at Brown University since 1988 and teaches beginning, intermediate and advanced courses in both. His research in linguistics and South Asian languages have led him to produce a paper on Kashmiri syntax as well as to co-author a textbook for colloquial Urdu published by Routledge and to develop his own Hindi teaching materials. He has prepared materials on Ancient India, the Vedic period, and South Asian religious traditions for his classes.

Currently, Koul is working on revising Hindi reading comprehension materials which are currently being used by his intermediate and upper level classes. He is also working on Songbook of Hindi film lyrics and Urdu Gazals which provides the text, glossary, cultural notes, and some background about the songs themselves. These are also being used by his advanced classes.

Selected Publications

Lexical Borrowing in Kashmiri. Creative Books, New Delhi (Forthcoming) 2006

‘Multiple Case marking in Kashmiri Possessive Traditional vs. Modern perspective’ (Kashi and Koul)Published in a book entitled Topics in Kashmiri Linguistics, edited by Omkar Koul & Kashi Wali Pp. 63-86. Creative Books, New Delhi 2002

‘Significance of Topic in V2 Languages: Evidence from Kashmiri’ (co-author) Published in a book entitled Topics in Kashmiri Linguistics, edited by Omkar Koul & Kashi Wali  Pp. 87-103. Creative Books, New Delhi 2002

 ‘Under the surface of the South Asian Linguistic Area: More on the Syntax of Derived Transitives and Causatives in Kashmiri’(with Hook) 2002 Published in a book entitled Topics in Kashmiri Linguistics, edited by Omkar Koul & Kashi Wali Pp. 103-112. Creative Books, New Delhi

‘Suffixaufnahme in Kashmiri: A Modern Perspective’ (Kashi, Koul) South Asia Syntax and Semantics Published in South Asian Language Review, Creative Publishers New Delhi. 2001

Colloquial Urdu. 2000 (with Bhatia) A textbook for a beginning course in Urdu. Routledge Publishing Company, London.

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Ashok Koul

Senior Lecturer in Language Studies
Center for Language Studies

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Kaivan Munshi

Kaivan Munshi, Associate Professor of Economics, focuses his research on non-market institutions, networks, cooperatives, and families, particularly in developing countries. Using his own data-collection, his work includes an NIH sponsored project in collaboration with Nancy Luke on family income and family welfare in India, as well as a project sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation on male-female income differentials and household decisions and outcomes in Kerala, India.

One of Munshi’s recent projects examines education and marriage in network based economies. The objective of this research is to understand how social institutions shape the development process and, conversely, how growth alters the social structure. The project studies the role of caste-based labor market networks in shaping schooling decisions, measured by the choice of the language of instruction, in Bombay's Maharashtrian community. The project also examines how economic change, in particular the income inequality generated by the Green Revolution in rural India, affected the integrity of caste-based networks by inducing marriages outside the endogamous sub-caste.

Munshi also teaches the class ‘The Economic Analysis of Institutions’ which deals substantially with South Asia and the organization of land, credit, markets and the role of the community in facilitating economic activity.

Selected Publications

"Traditional Institutions Meet the Modern World: Caste, Gender, and Schooling Choice in a Globalizing Economy" Forthcoming. American Economic Review, with Mark Rosenzweig.

How Efficiently is Capital Allocated? Evidence from the Knitted Garment Industry in Tirupur.” 2004. Review of Economic Studies 71(1):19-42, with Abhijit Banerjee.

Social Learning in a Heterogeneous Population: Technology Diffusion in the Indian Green Revolution.” 2004. Journal of Development Economics . 73(1): 185-215.

Inequality, Control Rights and Rent Seeking: Sugar Cooperatives in Maharashtra .” 2001. Journal of Political Economy 109(1):138-190, with Abhijit Banerjee, Dilip Mookherjee and Debraj Ray.

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Kaivan Munshi

Associate Professor
Economics

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Mark Pitt

Mark Pitt, Professor of Economics, focuses his research on theoretically informed analysis of the demographic and health-related behaviors of households, primarily in the developing world, and has emphasized primary data collection. Issues of gender and intrahousehold resource allocation are central themes, with the effects of targeted micro-credit programs on household resource allocation being the most important topic he has tackled in recent years.

Pitt is currently working on two important projects in Bangladesh. The first, funded by the NICHD and conducted in collaboration with Stan Becker and Ruhul Amin, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, seeks to asses the relative impact of three program interventions (micro-credit, health, and family planning) targeted at poor women in Bangladesh on a variety of heath and family planning attitudes and behaviors and will collect pre- and post-intervention data. The second project, funded by the NIDDK, will provide family-based and individual panel information on long-term health and productivity effects of childhood nutritional intakes, indoor air pollution, and health interventions over a 25-year span. This project is being completed in collaboration with Mark R. Rosenzweig of Yale University and Md. Nazmul Hassan of Dhaka University in Bangladesh.

Selected Publications

Pitt, Mark M., Shahidur R. Khandker, and Jennifer Cartwright. "Empowering Women with Micro-finance: Evidence from Bangladesh." Economic Development and Cultural Change, forthcoming

Pitt M, Khandker S, Chowdhury O, Millimet D. Credit Programs for the Poor and the Health Status of Children in Rural Bangladesh. International Economic Review. 2003; 44: 87-118.

Pitt M, Khandker S. Credit Programs for the Poor and Seasonality in Rural Bangladesh. Journal of Development Studies. 2002; 39(2): 1-24.

Pitt M. The Effect of Nonagricultural Self-Employment Credit on Contractual Relations and Employment In Agriculture: The Case of Microcredit Programs in Bangladesh. Bangladesh Development Studies. 2000; June-Sept: 15-48.

Pitt M, Khandker S, McKernan S, Latif M. Credit Programs for the Poor and Reproductive Behavior in Low-Income Countries: Are the Reported Causal Relationships the Result of Heterogeneity Bias? Demography. 1999; 36: 1-21.

Pitt M, Khandker S. The Impact of Group-Based Credit Programs on Poor Households in Bangladesh: Does the Gender of Participants Matter? Journal of Political Economy. 1998; 106: 958-96.

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Mark Pitt

Professor
Economics

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Peter Scharf

Peter Scharf, Senior Lecturer in the Classics Department, teaches both Sanskrit and Indian Literature. His research focuses on ancient Indian philosophy of language and linguistics, concepts of the self, and Vedic ancillary literature. His first book, The Denotation of Generic Terms in Ancient Indian Philosophy: Grammar, Nyaya, and Mimamsa, analyzes and compares the views of three ancient Indian linguistic schools of thought concerning the meaning of common nouns.

Current research projects include the preparation of a critical edition of Sadgurusisya's Vedarthadipika and a work on Yaska's Nirukta. He is also engaged in preparing Sanskrit teaching materials, including a first-year university text and a series of independent-study readers in Sanskrit in both printed and electronic form, the first of which is Ramopakhyana: The Story of Rama in the Mahabharata. The web-based versions of these readers with a powerful index are open to the use of scholars and students of Sanskrit in his virtual Sanskrit Library.

Selected Publications

Ramopakhyana--the Story of Rama in the Mahabharata: An Independent-study Reader in Sanskrit. London: Routledge Curzon, 2002.

"Paninian accounts of the Vedic subjunctive: let krnvaite." Indo-Iranian Journal, 49.1 (2006): 1-26, in press. (Paper presented at the 214th Meeting of the American Oriental Society, 12-15 March 2004, San Diego, California.)

"The Natural-language Foundation of Metalinguistic Case-use in the Astadhyayi and Nirukta." In Proceedings of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference, Vyakarana Section, ed. George Cardona and Madhav Deshpande. (Paper presented at the 12th World Sanskrit Conference, 13-18 July 2003, Helsinki, Finland.) In press.

"Panini, vivaksa, and karaka-rule-ordering." In Indian Linguistic Studies: Festschrift in Honour of George Cardona, ed. Madhav M. Deshpande and Peter E. Hook, pp. 121-149. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2002.

Review of Indian Semantic Analysis: The nirvacana Tradition, by Eivind Kahrs. JAOS 121.1 (2001): 116-120.

Review of Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of Sanskrit Language, edited by Jan E. M. Houben. Anthropological Linguistics 40.1 (1998): 167-174.

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Lecturer
Economics

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Donna Wulff

Donna Wulff, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and a founding member of the South Asian Faculty Group, specializes in the Hindu tradition. She has worked on both medieval and modern devotion (bhakti), music, drama, and aesthetics; and goddesses and gender issues. She is currently completing a book entitled, Reproaching God, Reviling Husbands: Women's Voices in Bengali Devotional Performance. The book deals with Radha as the hurt heroine, tracing this idea from Sanskrit through to the performance of today. The book includes a number of medieval lyrics translated by Wulff herself, as well as interviews with men and women viewing performances around this theme.

She is also working on an article which she hopes to extend to a book-length project on the lives of four women singers of pradabli kirtan which traces the development of this performance style from the earliest non-courtesan women performers. The article focuses on her interviews with three of these women and with family, friends and students of the fourth and through forming a biography of these women’s lives examines how they were able to maintain respectability.

Her classes focus on comparing and exploring religion in South Asia. She teaches the introductory Religious Studies class “Introduction to Indian Religions” as well as “Hindu and Christian Modes of Loving Devotion” and a number of other upper level Religious Studies seminars which focus on religion in South Asia.

Selected Publications

Donna Wulff and John Stratton Hawley, eds., Devi: Goddesses of India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

"On Practicing Religiously: Music as Sacred in India," in Sacred Sound: Music in Religious Thought and Practice, ed. Joyce Irwin, Journal of American Academy of Religion, Thematic Studies 50/1 Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1993: 149-72.

"Religion in a New Mode: Aesthetics and Supreme Realization in Medieval India." in Journal of the American Academy of Religion LIV/4 (Winter 1987), pp. 673-88.

Drama as a Mode of Religious Realization: The Vidagdhamadhava of Rupa Gosvami. Chico, California: Scholars Press. American Academy of Religion Academy Series, No.43, 1984.

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Associate Professor
Religious Studies

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Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Assistant Professor of History, is a scholar of modern South Asia with research interests in cross-border histories on the margins of a divided South Asia. Her book ‘The Long Partition: Making New Nations in Divided South Asia’ is forthcoming from Columbia University Press, and is based on her research with north Indian Muslim families that became divided between Delhi, India, and Karachi, Pakistan, as a result of the violence and displacements of the Partition of 1947. She is also involved in a project on 1971, to bring together scholars from Pakistan and Bangladesh to examine shared histories of the war and the liberation of Bangladesh.

While she continues to be very interested in questions of memory, violence and nationhood, she is also engaged in a new research project on a substantially different theme. It centers on a World Heritage Gandharan Buddhist site in northern Pakistan as it came to be transformed from a local ruin into an archaeological site embodying colonial science and history of India, and then into world heritage in a post-colonial national order.

Selected Publications

The Long Partition : Making New Nations in Divided South Asia . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

"Where have the Buddhas Gone? Ruined and Recorded Histories in North-Western Pakistan", InVisible Histories: The Politics of Placing the Past, Special Issue for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 2007.

"Yeh mulk hamara ghar: the national order of things and Muslim identity in John Mathew Mattan"s Sarfaroosh", in Contemporary South Asia. Vol. 11, no.2 (2002):183-198.

"Rite of Passage: The Partition of History and the Dawn of Pakistan", Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1, no.2 (1999):183-200.

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Vazira Zamindar

Assistant Professor
History

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