Presenters for India workshop

Itty Abraham (Ph.D. Univ. of Illinois) is currently on leave from the Social Science Research Council, where he has worked since 1992 as program director for South and Southeast Asia Global Security and Cooperation, to teach at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington Univ. He is the author of The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the Postcolonial State (1998) and co-editor of both Southeast Asian Diasporas (1995) and Illicit Flows: How States, Borders, and Language Produce Criminality (expected 2005).

Betty Buck (Ph.D. Univ. of Hawai’i), the founding co-director of the Asian Studies Development Program, currently serves as Special Assistant to the President for Education at the East-West Center. Although officially retired, she remains on the path, bodhisattva-like, to encourage and guide those whose exploration of Asian Studies has just begun. Chief among her publications is Paradise Regained: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawaii (1993).

Wimal Dissanayake (Ph.D. Cambridge Univ., Ph.D. Univ. of Pennsylvania) is a former Research Associate at the East-West Center and the former head of the Univ. of Sri Lanka’s Dept. of Mass Communication.  He is the author or editor of more than twenty books on media and cinema, including Raj Kapoor’s Films: Harmony of Discourses (1988), Cinema and Cultural Identity (1988), Melodrama and Asian Cinema (1993), Indian Popular Cinema (1998), New Chinese Cinema (1998), A Profile of Sri Lanka Cinema (1999), and Rethinking Third World Cinema (2000), and is the founding editor of the seminal East-West Film Journal.

Peter Hershock (Ph.D. Univ. of Hawai’i) is Coordinator of Summer and Outreach Programs for the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center. His most recent research focuses on applying Buddhist conceptual and critical resources in addressing contemporary issues, including technology and development, human rights, social activism, and the role of normative values in international relations. His publications include Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism (1996), Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (1999), and the edited collection Technology and Cultural Values on the Edge of the Third Millennium (2003).  He is currently exploring Buddhist thinking about the public good.

Gail Minault (Ph.D. Univ. of Pennsylvania) is professor of History and Asian Studies at the Univ. of Texas, Austin, where her courses include European Expansion in Asia, Modern Indian Social and Religious Reform, Muslim India before 1750, History and Culture of India Since 1750, Intellectual History of Indo-Iranian Islam, and Women in Asian Societies. Among her publications are The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (1982), Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (1998), and edited collections of essays on purdah in southeast Asia and on women’s political participation in India and Pakistan.

Bharati Mukherjee (M.F.A. and Ph.D. Univ. of Iowa), a professor of English at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, is widely respected as a novelist and cultural commentator. Her fiction focuses on the phenomenon of migration, the status of new immigrants, and the feeling of alienation often experienced by expatriates, as well as on Indian women and their struggle. Among her works are The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), Wife (1975), An Invisible Woman (1981), Darkness (1985), The Middleman and Other Stories (1988, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction), Jasmine (1989), The Holder of the World (1993), Leave It to Me (1997), Desirable Daughters (2003), The Tree Bride: A Novel (2004), and several nonfiction works on India, some written in collaboration with her husband, author Blaise Clark.