Anastasia is a social anthropologist trained at Boston University and at Oxford. She has conducted extensive ethnographic and historical research in northern India since 2002. She now teaches at the India Institute at King’s College London, having previously taught anthropology and South Asian studies at Bristol and Cambridge. Anastasia works on India’s vernacular norms of personhood and relatedness, and the ways in which these orient India’s democratic process, and especially local conceptions of political representation and responsibility. She is especially interested in how hierarchical values – idioms of kingship, patronage and divinity – shape Indian conceptions of political good, and the implications of this for comparative democratic theory. She has previously written on crime, policing and corruption in India, on secrecy and the public sphere, on ‘criminal tribes,’ patronage and democracy, hierarchy and egalitarianism, and on social theory and the history of anthropology at large. Anastasia was previously co-Investigator of a European Research Council & Economic and Social Research Council-funded project on South Asia's democratic cultures. She is editor of Patronage as politics in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and author of Nobody’s people: Hierarchy as hope in a society of thieves (Stanford University Press, 2020).

Uday Chandra is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University, Qatar. He received his PhD in political science from Yale University and held a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. His research lies at the intersection between critical agrarian studies, political anthropology, postcolonial theory, and South Asian studies. He is interested in state-society relations, power and resistance, political violence, agrarian change, rural-urban migration, popular religion, and the philosophy of the social sciences. His work has been published or will appear shortly in the Law & Society Review, Social Movement Studies, Interventions, Critical Sociology, The Journal of Contemporary Asia, Contemporary South Asia, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, The Journal of Asian Studies, and Modern Asian Studies. He has co-edited volumes and journal issues on self-making in modern South Asia, subaltern politics and the state in modern India, caste relations in eastern India, and social movements across rural India today. His first monograph Negotiating Leviathan: Making Tribes and States in Modern India will be published by Stanford University Press. He is also working on a second book project on Hindu nationalism and democracy in postcolonial India.

Dilip M Menon is the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand. He is a historian of South Asia who works on caste and inequality in particular but also writes on film, literature and art. His earlier publications include Caste Nationalism and Communism in South India, 1900-1948 (Cambridge, 1994, 2007); The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in Modern India (Delhi, 2006) and an edited volume on the Cultural History of Modern India (Delhi, 2007) which is also available in a Hindi edition. Over the past decade his work has engaged with oceanic histories and the question of knowledge from the global south resulting in two volumes, the first  titled Capitalisms: towards a global history Oxford, 2020) edited with Kaveh Yazdani. The second which is forthcoming is titled Concepts from the Global South and is forthcoming in 2021. The ongoing project on the global south and oceans will result in three edited volumes between 2021 and 2022. Cinemas of the global south edited with Amir Allam (Routledge); Cosmopolitan Thought Zones and Oceanic Histories edited with Nishat Zaidi (Routledge); and Ocean as Method edited with Nishat Zaidi et al (Palgrave Macmillan)

Lisa Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Anthropology & History in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University, and has previously taught history at Queens College (CUNY), Bowdoin College, and the University of Washington, and anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Hailing the State: Collective Assembly and the Politics of Representation in the History of Indian Democracy (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press, 2009 and Permanent Black, 2010), which was recipient of the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities. She is currently working on a new book project on translations of globally circulating political ideas, provisionally entitled, The Multiple Genealogies of Indian Democracy: Global Intellectual History in Translation. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright-Nehru and Fulbright-Hays programs, Mellon Foundation, and the American Institute for Indian Studies, and has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2014-2015), and a Mercator Visiting Fellow in Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität in Berlin (2018). In 2020 she was a recipient of the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

I specialize in the intersections of Indian/South Asian and global intellectual history and global political theory, as well as in political and economic theology. My doctoral dissertation has been published as The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2018). I have co-edited volumes on royal nationalism, dynasty, and legal thought in relation to modern global history. I have written about canonical Indian and European political thinkers, examining the globalized production and circulation of ideas about state sovereignty, nationalism, democracy, property, and religion. Introducing perspectives of Subaltern Studies into debates on global intellectual history, I have centre-staged subaltern intellectual history, examining the political and social thought of peasants, Adivasi/Indigenous actors, and refugees. My most recent research focuses on rethinking human-nonhuman relations in the age of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene.

Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and anthropologist interested in the material infrastructures and mediations of political life. Her research in the Indian city of Mumbai has studied how global-level processes of urbanization and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial inclusions and exclusions in that city, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contention and representation. Her first book, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press 2015), based on her doctoral research at the New School for Social Research, was awarded the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences in 2014. Her second book, Waiting Town: Life in transit and Mumbai’s Other World-Class Histories, published by Columbia University Press in 2020, is an ethnographic account of knowledge production and the politics of truthmaking. Her most recent book, a collaborative monograph entitled Bombay Brokers, was published with Duke University Press in 2021. In 2015 she joined the faculty of Urban Affairs at the University of Louisville. In January 2021 she joined the Department Anthropology of Politics and Governance at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle as a Humboldt Senior Research Fellow. Her current research at the MPI on “Material mediations, crowd politics, and theatrical idiom of political speech in contemporary India”, will result in a book-length monograph.

Lipika Kamra is a lecturer in the politics of South Asia at Queen Mary University of London. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and has taught politics and anthropology at Georgetown University, Qatar and Jindal Global University, India. Her research interests crisscross political anthropology, digital geographies, comparative politics, gender studies, critical development studies, and South Asian politics. More specifically, she examines how states and their citizens interact in insurgency and counterinsurgency contexts; how women mediate the terrain of development and democracy in the Global South; and how digital media increasingly influences everyday politics. Her work has been published in Critique of Anthropology, Antipode, City and Society, Journal of South Asian Development, and Contemporary South Asia. She is currently completing a book manuscript on counterinsurgency as a driver of statemaking in the margins of modern India. The book focuses on non-military modes of counterinsurgency, such as development, and how these frame state-society relations, with a focus on how women navigate citizenship and development in a counterinsurgency context in rural West Bengal. She is now working on two projects: (1) the role of the digital messaging app, WhatsApp, in shaping everyday political life from the family to political party and the nation-state in India. See https://whatsapppolitics.com/ . (2) the role and experiences of women voters in India’s changing democracy.

Dale is a Ph.D. student in the history program at Georgetown University. A Georgetown Early Modern World Fellow, his research interests include the history of commodities and imperial and non-imperial polities in Early Modern South Asia. Menezes is interested in the role of South Asians—kings, merchants and laborers—in the making of a global world (or ‘globalizing world’, as he likes to think of it) since the 1500s. His research straddles the European and non-European spheres of South Asia’s globalizing history and tries to view these seemingly different components as forming a part of the same political economy. As a result, he happily spends a lot of time reading about Europe, Latin America, and more recently, Africa.

Edward Moon-Little is an anthropologist who has worked across Northeast India, most recently in the Imphal valley, Manipur. His doctoral research addressed the legacies of kingship in Manipur, with a focus on Pakhangba, the ancestral deity of the royal clan. Much of Edward’s ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the Kangla heritage site in Imphal. Within the UK, Edward has researched a range of social issues, from the mobilisation of the far right to online anti-vaccination narratives, with a focus on informing public policy development. In India, Edward has advised on heritage and health projects through his work as a member of the Highland Institute (formerly the Kohima Institute)

Trained in anthropology at Oxford University and Cambridge University, Edward has a forthcoming chapter Like The Fish Follow The Python in Jelle Wouters’s edited volume Vernacular Politics in Northeast India (2022). Edward has also published on dream taboos and competing conceptions of sacrifice in Northeast India. Alongside Jelle Wouters (also a member of this project), Edward is part of the Highlander Press, an open-access publisher focused on upland Asia.

I am a literary historian working primarily with Hindi and Urdu materials and interested in exploring how multilingualism worked and continues to work within the literary cultures of South Asia. After a BA in Hindi from Venice University in Italy, I studied in Delhi at the Central Institute of Hindi and Jawaharlal Nehru University before coming to SOAS for my PhD. For my dissertation, I worked on the Hindi literary sphere of the 1920s and 1930s and the contrast between the ebullience of literary and social experimentation in journals, including women’s journals, and the canonization of “pure” Hindi and moral-patriotic Hindi literature in education (The Hindi Public Sphere, 2002, Hindi tr. 2010).

I then got interested in book history and worked on commercial publishing in Hindi and Urdu in the nineteenth century (Print and Pleasure, 2009), which interestingly saw a proliferation of “oral-literate” genres printed in both Hindi and Urdu scripts just as modern rigid language ideologies consolidated.

Back at SOAS after teaching for several years at Cambridge, I ran a research project on "North Indian Literary Culture and History" (funded by the AHRC) that sought to rethink the history of early modern north Indian literature from a sustained multilingual perspective. We began by reconsidering the fifteenth-century, the little-studied period before the Mughals (After Timur Left, co-edited with Samira Sheikh, 2014). Another focus was performance, songs and story-telling (Tellings and Texts, co-edited with Katherine Schofield 2015). But I am also interested in contemporary literature and popular culture, and a recent project (with Ravikant at SARAI/CSDS) explored the cultural and social dimensions of “Hinglish”, Hindi-English language mixing in media and everyday life.

Currently I am finishing a book on the multilingual literary history of Awadh from the 15c to the early-20c. I am also leading the project “Multilingual locals and significant geographies: for a new approach to world literature” (MULOSIGE, funded by the European Research Council), which seeks to propose an alternative, located and multilingual, approach to world literature, from the perspective of three regional sites – north India, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa – in the colonial and postcolonial periods and the contemporary globalizing moment.

I am interested in the worldliness of literature both as it inhabits and intervenes in the world, and also in the imaginative worlds literature creates. I am interested in supervising original projects on literature in South Asia that take up new questions, new materials or approaches, and in literary comparisons beyond India and Europe. There are few places in the world where such projects can be undertaken, and SOAS is one of them.

I am a historian of South Asia with particular interests in colonial and postcolonial India, racism and social exclusion, subaltern histories, and histories of democracy. My research focuses on Dalits (‘untouchables’) of India and their engagement with colonialism, nationalism, spatial and social exclusionary regimes, and democratic thought and practice in modern India. I have recently finished a co-edited book, Dalit Studies, with my colleague K. Satyanarayana based in Hyderabad (India), Duke University Press, 2016. I am currently writing a second book, ‘The Dalit Public Sphere: A Subaltern history Liberalism and Democratic Practices’ which explores the role of Dalit groups in introducing innovative ideas and practices in the history of liberal thought. The second book project has received generous support from the Smuts Visiting Fellowship, University of Cambridge, the American Council of Learned Societies’ Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, and the Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Tommaso is a social and political anthropologist who teaches the Anthropology of South Asia at the University of Siena. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research in norther India since 2003, focusing on the interaction of customary and state justice and law, on forms of rural politics, on local idioms and practices of relatedness, and on social change. He has worked on a number of international projects focusing on Indian villages, infrastructure, microcredit and debt, and law. He conducted most of his research in the states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, working in Hindi, Marwari and Malwi. He has written on traditional councils (panchayats), crime, gifts, and communalism in rural Madhya Pradesh, having recently published on the life and legend of a bandit in a Malwa village. Tommaso also works on migration and asylum seeking, and onintercultural theory and translation. He is editor, with Stefano Jacoviello, of Shifting Borders: European Perspectives on Creolisation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012).
"Shifting Borders: European Perspectives on Creolisation"

A. R. Venkatachalapathy (1967), Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, took his PhD in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has taught at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, the University of Madras and the University of Chicago, and has held research assignments in Paris, Cambridge, London, and Harvard. He was the ICCR Chair in Indian Studies at the National University of Singapore (2011–12). He was awarded the V.K.R.V. Rao Prize (History, 2007) and Vilakku Pudumaippithan Award for lifetime contribution to Tamil (2018).

Chalapathy has published widely on the social, cultural and intellectual history of colonial Tamilnadu. Apart from his scholarly writings in English he has written/edited over thirty books in Tamil. His publications in English include Tamil Characters: Personalities, Politics, Culture (Pan Macmillan 2018); Who Owns That Song?: The Battle for Subramania Bharati’s Copyright (Juggernaut, 2018); The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu (Permanent Black, 2012), In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History (Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2006), (ed.) Chennai, Not Madras (Marg, Mumbai, 2006), (ed.), In the Tracks of the Mahatma: The Making of a Documentary (Orient Longman, Delhi, 2006), (ed.) Love Stands Alone: Selections from Tamil Sangam Poetry (Penguin, 2010), and (ed.) Red Lilies and Frightened Birds: ‘Muttollayiram’ (Penguin, 2011). He is also the translator of Sundara Ramaswamy’s J.J.: Some Jottings (Penguin, 2016). Presently he is working on a biography of Periyar.

Piers Vitebsky studied ancient languages before becoming a social anthropologist specialising in the religions and ecologies of indigenous peoples in India and Arctic Siberia. He was educated in Cambridge, Oxford, London and Delhi, and recently retired as Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge. He is also involved in advocacy for refugees and chairs the humanitarian Sutasoma Trust. His books include Dialogues with the Dead: the Discussion of Mortality among the Sora of Eastern India (1993); Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos (2017), which was shortlisted for the New India Foundation book prize; and Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (2005). In Russia he is Honorary Professor at the North-Eastern Federal University and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). His current projects include writing a dictionary and app for young Sora who are now being schooled in outsider languages.

Jelle has conducted extensive ethnographic and historical research among the upland and tribal Naga in India's lesser-known Northeastern region, writing about colonial ethnography, hill-valley social and political dynamics, the politics of identity, and social history. His main research focus has been on with Naga political lifeworlds, vernacular democracy, and the development state. It draws on two years field research (funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation) in a Chakhesang and Chang Naga village. He holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Social Anthropology from Oxford, a PhD in Anthropology from the North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong (India). Prior to teaching the Royal Thimphu College (Bhutan), he taught at the Sikkim Central University, where he established the Anthropology Department, and was a Visiting Fellow (2014-2015) at Eberhard Karls University on a “Teaching for Excellence” award granted by the German Research Foundation.

Udaya Kumar was born in Kerala State in India, and completed his university education in Trivandrum, New Delhi and Oxford. He works currently as Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has previously taught at the Universities of Delhi and Pune, and has been Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Senior Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. His areas of teaching and research include literary and cultural theory, modern literature, and forms of life writing. His recent research has focused on the relations between death and contemporary culture, cultural histories of the body, political dimensions of affect, and idioms of vernacular social thought. His publications include The Joycean Labyrinth: Reptition, Time and Tradition in Ulysses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), Writing the First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016), and several research papers on contemporary Indian literature and cultural theory. He writes and publishes in the English and Malayalam languages.

S.V. Srinivas is a professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He has been associated with the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bengaluru, since 1998 and is now one of its trustees. He also held visiting positions at Georgetown University, Indian Institute of Science and University of Hyderabad. His books Megastar (OUP, 2009) and Politics as Performance (Permanent Black, 2013) trace the simultaneous emergence of the film industries, star-politicians, and fandoms in South India. He is the co-editor (with Adrian Athique and Vibodh Parthasarathi) of the two-volume collection of essays titled The Indian Media Economy (OUP, 2018). His current research focusses on spectatorial practices and their implications for mass mobilisations.

Vikramaditya (Vikram) Thakur received his Ph.D. from Yale University in Sociocultural Anthropology in 2014. He was then a Postdoctoral Fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science for two years. He was subsequently a Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Brown University. Thakur joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in 2018. Thakur studies the forced displacement and relocation of over four thousand families of Bhils, a hill community in western India, due to the construction of one of the largest dams in the world on the Narmada River. This project is based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research using a historical perspective. Thakur has also studied the transformation of agriculture and changes in household economy among the Bhils. He is the co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India (Oxford University Press, India and Pluto Press, 2018). His research interests include Development Studies and Environmental Anthropology, informed by ethnographic fieldwork and archival research.