Bishnu Mohapatra

DPhil, Oxford University

Bishnu N Mohapatra is a political scientist and poet, an educator and a commentator on society, governance, policy and culture. He is also the Professor of Politics at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University. Bishnu had taught politics for more than twenty-five years at University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University and AzimPremji University. He has held visiting appointments at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, National University of Singapore, University of Kyoto, Japan, and National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. He has lectured at several universities in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. From 2002 to 2010, he headed the governance portfolio of the Ford Foundation’s South Asia office, New Delhi.

Bishnu has published in the areas of identity politics, democracy, minority rights, urban politics, civil society and social capital. He is currently researching cities and their multiple imaginings in history. He is also in the process of initiating a collective research project that seeks to understand the conceptual universe embedded in India’s Bhasa literature.

Bishnu is also a well-known Indian poet. He has authored four books of poetry and has translated two volumes of Pablo Neruda’s poetry into Odia. A volume of his poetry in the English translation – a fragile world- was published in 2005. He has a Master’s degree in Political Science from University of Delhi, an MPhil in Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a DPhil in Politics from University of Oxford.

Dr Karthick Narayanan

PhD, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Dr R Karthick Narayanan was awarded PhD in Linguistics from the Center for Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, in February 2021. He has written a thesis. titled Maintenance of minority languages of Nilgiri district, Tamilnadu: A Case Study of Toda, and Kota. His core areas of expertise in Linguistics are in the subfields of Sociolinguistics and language documentation and conservation. He also has a keen interest in digital language data management and the preservation of endangered languages. He has worked as a research fellow at Scheme for protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore; Centre for Oral and Tribal Literature, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi and Centre for Endangered Languages, Sikkim University. Moreover, he was recently employed as a teaching faculty at the Department of Linguistics, Central University of Karnataka.

His past research includes 1) Documenting Toda folklore 2) Investigating the complicated process of language endangerment and loss in multilingual societies by studying linguistics practices of Toda and Kota community and 3) Developing an endangered language archive (Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalayas Endangered Language Archive) to protect and preserve primary data of endangered languages.

Dr Mumtaz Ahmad Numani

Dr Mumtaz Ahmad Numani has obtained a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kashmir (2007), a Master of Arts in Modern/Medieval Indian History (2009), an MPhil (2013) and PhD (2019) in Environmental History from the Centre of Advanced Study in History, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. He has worked as a short-term research fellow at the Tribal Research Institute, Jammu & Kashmir. Dr Numani has worked as Chief Coordinator and Advisor (2012—2018) of The Peace Gong (now Peace Insight), a global children’s newspaper connecting children for a non-violent planet. He has presented a number of research papers at national and international conferences and published a number of research papers/ book reviews/ book chapters in reputed international publications such as Springer & Rutledge. In 2021 he received the Young Social Scientist of the year Award from the National Environmental Science Academy (NESA), New Delhi. He has also worked as general editor of the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union’s (AMUSU) Annual Magazine, The Aligarian-18, for the session 2017-2018. He is an occasional author/ columnist for The Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir, and others. His core area of research is environmental humanities with special reference to Kashmir, India.  

Dr Biswajit Sarmah

PhD, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati

Dr Biswajit Sarmah completed his PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati. For his doctoral research, he wrote an environmental history of the Kaziranga National Park, Assam, where he combined extensive archival work (in India, the USA and the UK) and ethnographic research in Kaziranga. His work is published/forthcoming in Environment and History and Conservation and Society. He is working on a book monograph based on his doctoral dissertation.

His research interests are in the history and politics of wildlife conservation, especially large mammals in the global south. While science and law dominate the current conservation discourse, his research foregrounds the agrarian dimensions of wildlife conservation. In doing so, he considers forests, farms and pastures within a composite unit of analysis. This approach takes the history and success of wildlife conservation into exciting directions, such as agroecological variations, interspecies relationships, and cultural politics. His research shows how the cultural politics around large mammals like the greater one-horned rhinoceros, water buffalo and tiger influenced their conservation outcomes. He’s expanding his work into wildlife reintroductions as a process of re-naturing spaces and nation-making. He is passionate about securing quality higher education for students from marginal groups.

Dr Sarmah received the Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Fellowship, Charles Wallace India Trust Travel grant and University Grant Commission-Junior Research Fellowship (UGC-JRF) (not availed). He studied Development at Azim Premji University and Mathematics at the University of Delhi.

Dr P Arun

PhD, University of Delhi

Dr P Arun holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Delhi. His doctoral research explores the history of telegraph and telephone surveillance and its concomitant effects on fundamental rights and freedoms in liberal democracies. It traces the emergence of communications surveillance, particularly how surveillance in telegraph and telephone communications evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His areas of academic and research interest include law, technology, and politics, with a specialisation in communications surveillance and privacy.

His research has been published in journals such as Indian Law Review, Economic & Political Weekly, Surveillance & Society, and National Law School Journal. He was formerly an Adjunct and Guest Faculty at the Ambedkar University of Delhi and Lakshmibai College, University of Delhi, respectively. He is currently working on the history of telegraph surveillance in British India during 1910-1940, which looks into the surveillance power exercised to control telegraph communications by the colonial state. Such surveillance caused difficulty for people to communicate in colonial India and abroad, leading to the articulation of their ‘freedom to communicate.’

Dr Zaen Alkazi

PhD, School of Oriental and African Studies

Dr Zaen Alkazi is an urban, economic and labour historian of late colonial South Asia. He completed a BA in Philosophy and MA in History from University College London. In 2020, he received a PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies for his thesis, The Political Imaginations of Bombay’s Textile Workers, c. 1928-1946. His post-PhD research work has focused on how the political worlds of textile and railway workers in interwar Western India were shaped by military service, trade unionism and regional political traditions. His latest project, The Railways in the Transition from Colony to Nation-State: The Central Railways, c. 1940-1964 considers how railway workers’ politics were shaped by a tumultuous period of world war, decolonisation and Nehruvian postcolonial nation-state making. He has previously taught at the Centre for Liberal Education, IIT Bombay.