Participants' Bios

Peter Awn is Dean of General Studies and Professor of Religion at Columbia University.

Janaki Bakhle is Assistant Professor of Modern South Asian history in the department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia.

Russell Banks is the author of fourteen works of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Cloudsplitter. Two novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, were made into award-winning films.

Tariq Banuri is a Senior Research Director at SEI Boston. His work focuses on sustainable development policy with particular reference to the interface between globalization, poverty reduction, and the role of civil society.

Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University and Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London.

Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and has written articles on Salman Rushdie.

Neil Bissoondath is the author of five books, including Doing the Heart Good (Hugh Maclennan Prize for Fiction), The Worlds Within Her (for which he was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Fiction) and Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multi-Culturalism in Canada.

Lee Bollinger is President of Columbia University. His primary teaching and scholarly interests are focused on free speech and First Amendment issues, and he has published numerous books, articles, and essays in scholarly journals on these and other subjects.

Vikram Chandra is the author of Love and Longing in Bombay and Red Earth and Pouring Rain, and is the winner of two Commonwealth Writers Prizes for Best Book and Best First Book.

Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and is the author of The Nation and its Fragments.

Michael Cunningham received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award, both for The Hours, and is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly.

E. Valentine Daniel is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia and the author of several books, including Charred Lullabies: Chapters in An Anthropology of Violence.

Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Columbia University.

Nicholas Dirks is an historian and anthropologist and the Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Castes of Mind.

Mahnaz Fancy directed the Program and Development efforts of the first South Asian cultural institution in New York, the IndoCenter of Art & Culture from 2000 to 2002. She is currently starting a new non-profit organization to serve the cultural needs of the growing South Asian population in the U.S.

Coco Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas and The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings, and is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University.

Chitra Ganesh holds an MFA from Columbia, and lives and works in Brooklyn. She serves on the Board of Directors of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, and her work is currently on view at the Queens Museum of Art.

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of ten books, among them Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives.

Amaney Jamal is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.

Madhur Jaffrey is a stage and screen actress who has appeared in numerous radio and television plays, on Broadway, and in film. She is also the author of several books on Indian and Asian cuisine.

Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic for The New York Times. This year she is a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia.

Jayme Koszyn directs a consulting firm that specializes in creative project and fund-raising support for cultural organizations and universities. Previously she was the Director of Education and Humanities for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She can be reached at JKoszyn@aol.com.

Leonard Lopate is the host of WNYC's weekday talk show "The Leonard Lopate Show" and of "Survival Kit." At the 92nd Street Y, he regularly appears as interviewer and moderator of his on-going panel series, "Comparing Notes."

Eduardo Machado is the Director of Playwriting at Columbia University, and is the author of over forty plays. His first feature film Exiles In New York has played at festivals throughout the world.

Manning Marable is the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University.

Rachel McDermott is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College and the author of Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kàla and Umà in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal.

Farzana Moon is a native of Pakistan whose work includes the historical Moghul sagas Babur The First Moghul in India, Divine Akbar, Holy Indian, and Glorious Taj and Beloved Immortal.

Aamir Mufti is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is co-editor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Post-Colonial Perspectives.

Syed Nauman Naqvi is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Columbia University, doing fieldwork on the socio-cultural history of state formation and nationalism in the 1970s in Pakistan.

Gyan Pandey is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on Modern South Asia, nationalism and communalism and ethnic conflict and violence.

Gyan Prakash is Professor of History at Princeton University, and is the author of Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. He is currently researching and writing a book on the history of imagined Bombay.

Arvind Rajagopal teaches media studies at NYU, and is the author of Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. In 1998-99, he was a Member of the School of Social Science, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Anupama Rao is Assistant Professor of South Asian history at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is currently completing The Caste Question: Struggles for Civil Rights and Recognition by Untouchables in India, 1927-1991.

Simon Reade is one of the three adaptors of Midnight's Children for the stage, and was the Royal Shakespeare Company's dramaturg. He is currently the Artistic Director of The Bristol Old Vic.

Gowher Rizvi is director of the Institute for Government Innovations at Harvard University. He was previously the head of the Ford Foundation in South Asia and Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford.

John Rockwell is senior cultural correspondent of The New York Times. For The Times he has been a classical music critic, chief rock critic, European cultural correspondent and Arts & Leisure editor. He was also director of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Salman Rushdie is the author of twelve books, including Midnight's Children (Booker Prize), Shame, Step Across This Line, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury.

Edward Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Orientalism, Covering Islam, and Peace and its Discontents.

Michael Scammell is the author of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Biography, a Vice President of International PEN, and teaches nonfiction writing, biography and translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia.

James Shapiro is Professor of English at Columbia and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of several books on Shakespeare.

Sreenath Sreenivasan is a journalism professor at Columbia University and co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association. He is also a technology reporter for WABC-TV.

Tunku Varadarajan is the Editorial Features Editor for The Wall Street Journal.

Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Southern Asian Institute at Columbia University. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief.

Patricia J. Williams is a professor of Law at Columbia University School of Law. She is the author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights and The Rooster's Egg, and is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellow "genius grant."