Steering Committee Members

As part of its unprecedented expansion of teaching and research related to South Asia, a University-wide Steering Committee comprised of eight senior scholars of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its professional schools will help set Harvard's academic agenda related to South Asia, and disburse funds in support of student and faculty research and education.

Sugata Bose

Chair

SUGATA BOSE is the Director of the South Asia Initiative at Harvard University and the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs. His main areas of research are modem South Asia and the history of the Indian Ocean region. Among his many publications are Modern South Asia : History, Culture, Political Economy (Routledge, 2004; with Ayesha Jalal), and A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of the Global Empire (Harvard University Press, 2006).

Homi Bhabha

HOMI K. BHABHA is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Department of English, Harvard University; Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard; and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London. His book, Location of Culture, has recently been reprinted as a Routledge Classic and has been translated into Korean, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic, and Portuguese. Most recently, he completed the introduction to a new translation of Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.

Recently, he delivered the Presidential Lecture at the Freie Universität Berlin, “Globalization and Cultural Identity”, as well as keynotes at “State of the World” forum at the Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon); Scope II: Sites and Sounds-Narrating Heritage, co-sponsored by three Austrian ministries (Vienna);the Goethe-Institut meeting of all directors of its international Goethe Instituts; and for the Volkswagen Foundation “Boundaries: Differences. Passages--Passages: Approaches in the Contested Fields of Inter- and Transcultural Communication” conference ( Dresden ). Previously, he gave the keynote addresses for the Colloquium on Research and Higher Education organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Beckman Lectures at the University of California , Berkeley and the Presidential Lectures at Stanford University . Also, he has served twice as a Faculty Advisor to the DAVOS World Economic Forum.

Educated at the University of Bombay and the University of Oxford , Bhabha advises key arts institutions which include the Institute of Contemporary Arts London , the Whitney Museum of American Arts, New York, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has published widely in journals including New Formations , October , Oxford Literary Review and Screen . He sits on the editorial board of, amongst others, October , Critical Inquiry , and New Formations , and is a regular contributor to Artforum . Bhabha is currently at work on A Measure of Dwelling , a theory of vernacular cosmopolitanism forthcoming from Harvard University Press and The Right to Narrate , forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Tarun Khanna

TARUN KHANNA, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, has been a member of the faculty since 1993, where he studies, and works with, multinational and indigenous companies and investors in emerging markets worldwide. He has served as course head of the required Strategy course in the Harvard MBA program, and chaired the executive education program on Strategy, Leadership & Governance. Currently, he teaches in Harvard's comprehensive general management executive education programs. He earned a Bachelors of Science in Engineering degree from Princeton University in 1988, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1993.

His current research focuses on understanding the drivers of entrepreneurship worldwide. As part of the Emerging Giants project, he seeks to understand how to build world-class companies from emerging markets worldwide. A related project, The Dragon and the Elephant , zeros in on China and India , and identifies best practices for local entrepreneurs and multinationals operating in each of these two countries. His scholarly work is published in a range of journals over the past fifteen years. During this time, he has continued to serve as a co-editor of several prestigious economics and management journals. A forthcoming book, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures and Yours , will be published by Harvard Business School Press (Penguin in South Asia ) in 2008.

Numerous articles in the Harvard Business Review (e.g. Emerging Giants: Building World Class Companies in Emerging Markets, 2006) and Foreign Policy (e.g. Can India Overtake China?, 2003) distil the implications of this research for practicing managers. Professor Khanna's work has been profiled in news-magazines around the world, including The Wall Street Journal , The Economist , the Far Eastern Economic Review , and newspapers in China , India, and elsewhere in Asia and Latin America . He has been a frequent commentator on ‘Competing in, and from, China and India ' and ‘Building the Developing country Multinational' on several TV and radio programs recently (NPR, BBC, CNN, CNBC, Voice of America, Bloomberg and local channels).

He serves on the advisory boards of several multinational and emerging market companies in the financial services, automotive, life sciences and agribusiness sectors. He is also actively involved in mentoring startups in Asia, and with volunteering time with non-profits in India , e.g. the Parliamentary Research Services in New Delhi , which seeks to provide non-partisan research input to India 's Members of Parliament in advance of legislative sessions with a view to enhancing the quality of democratic discourse.

In 2007, he was nominated to be a Young Global Leader (under 40) by the World Economic Forum.

Jennifer Leaning

JENNIFER LEANING's research and policy interests include problems of international human rights and humanitarian law, humanitarian crises, and medical ethics in practical settings of disasters and emergencies.

For ten years, Professor Leaning was editor in chief of Medicine & Global Survival , an international quarterly that addresses issues of war, disaster, human rights, and the environment from the perspective of medicine and public health (available on the web at http://www.ippnw.org/MGS/ ). She has field experience in problems of disaster response and human rights and has written widely on these issues.

She is also an attending in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Professor Leaning serves on the board of directors of several organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights (where she was a founding board member), The Humane Society of the United States, and the Massachusetts Bay Chapter of the American Red Cross.

She is chair of the Harvard University Student Health Coordinating Board and Visiting Editor of the British Medical Journal.

Krishna Palepu

KRISHNA G. PALEPU is the Ross Graham Walker Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for International Development, at the Harvard Business School . Prior to assuming his current administrative position, Professor Palepu held other positions at the School, including Senior Associate Dean, Director of Research, and Chair, Accounting and Control Unit.

Professor Palepu's current research and teaching activities focus on strategy and governance. Professor Palepu has published numerous academic and practitioner-oriented articles and case studies on these issues.

In the area of strategy, his recent focus has been on the globalization of emerging markets, particularly India and China , and the resulting opportunities and challenges for western investors and multinationals, and for local companies with global aspirations. He currently teaches a second year MBA course, "Globalization of Emerging Markets," which focuses on these issues. In addition, Professor Palepu Chairs the HBS executive program "Global CEOs Program for China ".

In the area of corporate governance, Professor Palepu's work focuses on how to make corporate boards more effective, and on improving corporate disclosure. Professor Palepu teaches these topics in several HBS programs aimed at members of corporate boards: "How to make corporate boards more effective, "Audit Committees in the new era of governance, "Compensation Committees: Preparing the challenges ahead." He also co-led Harvard Business School 's Corporate Governance, Leadership, and Values initiative, launched in response to the recent wave of corporate scandals and governance failures.

Prior to embarking on his current research, Professor Palepu worked on mergers and acquisitions and corporate disclosure. Based on this work, he coauthored the book, Business Analysis and Valuation: Text and Cases , which won the American Accounting Association's Wildman Award for its impact on management practice, as well as the Notable Contribution to the Accounting Literature Award for its impact on academic research. This book, translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish, is widely used in leading MBA programs all over the world. It is accompanied by a business analysis and valuation software model published by the Harvard Business School Publishing Company.

Professor Palepu serves on a number of public company and non-profit Boards. He has been on the Editorial Boards of leading academic journals, and has served as a consultant to a wide variety of businesses. He is also a frequent commentator in the news media on issues related to emerging markets and corporate governance.

Professor Palepu has a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration.

Rohini Pande

ROHINI PANDE is the Mohamed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University . She has previously taught at the Economics Departments at Columbia University and Yale University . Pande's research examines the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, and much of this work is focused on South Asia . On the evaluation front, she has examined the poverty impact of rural bank branch expansion in India , and also the distributional and growth effects of large dam construction in India . Her current program evaluation research uses a series of field experiments based in India to examines optimal design of microfinance repayment schedules. On the politics front, Pande has examined the role of mandated political representation in providing historically disadvantaged minorities political voice, and her current research examines how female leadership in rural India is affecting gender bias vis-à-vis leaders. She has also been working on caste politics and politician corruption in India , and the role of voter campaigns in affecting voting behavior in rural areas

Amartya Sen

AMARTYA SEN is Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until recently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. He was formerly Honorary President of OXFAM and is now its Honorary Advisor. Born in Santiniketan, India, Amartya Sen studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an Indian citizen. He was Lamont University Professor at
Harvard also earlier, from1988 – 1998, and previous to that he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University, and a Fellow of All Souls College (he is now a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls). Prior to that he was Professor of Economics at Delhi University and at the London School of Economics.

Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and include Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973, 1997), Poverty and Famines (1981), Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), Resources, Values and Development (1984), On Ethics and Economics (1987), The Standard of Living (1987), Inequality Reexamined (1992), Development as Freedom (1999), and Rationality and Freedom (2002), The Argumentative Indian (2005), and Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006), among others. His research has ranged over a number of fields in economics, philosophy, and decision theory, including social choice theory, welfare economics, theory of measurement, development economics, public health, gender studies, moral and political philosophy, and the economics
of peace and war.

Amartya Sen has received honorary doctorates from major universities in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Among the awards he has received are the “Bharat Ratna” (the highest honour awarded by the President of India); the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics; the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award; the Edinburgh Medal; the Brazilian Ordem do Merito Cientifico (Grã-Cruz); the Presidency of the Italian Republic Medal; the Eisenhower Medal; Honorary Companion of Honour (U.K.); The George E. Marshall Award, and the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Leonard van der Kuijp

LEONARD VAN DER KUIJP is Chair of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies and Professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Harvard University. Professor van der Kuijp worked at the Nepal Research Center, University Berlin, and University of Washington before joining the Harvard Faculty in July 1995.

His research focuses primarily on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhist intellectual history, and Tibetan-Mongol and Tibetan-Chinese relations. His books include: Still in Search of Dharma: Indian and Ceylonese Travellers in Fifteenth Century Tibet; The forthcoming third volume of Wisdom Publications' Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism series, Contributions to the Development of Tibetan Buddhist Epistemology From the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries

Professor van der Kuijp received his M.A. from University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, and his PhD from the University Hamburg, Germany. In 1993, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.