Professor Bishnu Mohapatra

DPhil, Oxford University

Professor Bishnu N Mohapatra is a political scientist and poet, an educator and a commentator on society, governance, policy and culture. He is also a Professor of Politics at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University. He had taught politics for more than twenty-five years at the University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Azim Premji University. Additionally, he has held visiting appointments at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, the National University of Singapore, the University of Kyoto, Japan, and the 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.

Professor Mohapatra 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.

Beyond academia, Professor Mohapatra 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 the University of Delhi, an MPhil in Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford.

Dr Mohammed Sajjad Hussain

Dr Mohammad Sajjad Hussain is a sociologist whose research interests include labor studies, platform studies, economic sociology, urban sociology, and qualitative research methods. He completed his PhD in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, where his doctoral research focused on food delivery workers and the changing nature of labour in India’s platform economy.

His research is grounded in ethnographic methods to understand everyday experiences of platform workers. His research has been published in journals including Labor History, Journal of South Asian Development, and Journal of Extreme Anthropology. His publications explore themes such as algorithmic management, gig worker’s mobilization and occupational stigma, in the food delivery sector.

At the Moturi Satyanarayana Centre, he continues to examine the societal implications of platformization, with particular attention to the food delivery sector. He is the recipient of the IJURR Writing Grant 2022 and attended the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme in 2019 on a scholarship. Prior to his current role, he worked as an Academic Associate at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore and as a researcher at the Hyderabad Urban Lab. He holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Delhi and a BA from Osmania University, Hyderabad.

Dr Salwa Yahya

Dr Salwa Yahya holds a PhD in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her BA in Political Science (Honours) at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, followed by an MA in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an M.Phil. in Social Science from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her research interests include identity politics and civil society in India, political theory, and research methodology. She has published in journals like ‘Studies in Indian Politics’ and ‘Contemporary South Asia’. Currently, she is converting her Doctoral dissertation on lower- caste (Pasmanda) Muslim activism in north India into a monograph. Drawn from ethnographically-informed and archival data, it analyzes various aspects of the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz’s (AIPMM) civic activism within civil society and viz-a-viz the Indian state.

Dr Aejaz Ahmad Wani

Dr Aejaz Ahmad Wani is a political theorist working at the intersection of wealth and power in democratic and non-democratic societies. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Kashmir. He has wide-ranging interests in political ethics, political economy, and elite and philanthropy studies. He is also interested in comparative political theory, particularly in deparochialising and de-locating the dominant- mainstream/anglophone/liberal/analytical political theory.

His first book, Deparochialising Global Justice: Global Poverty, Human Rights Cosmopolitanism and India’s Superrich, was published by Palgrave Macmillan (2024). His recent article (co-authored with Thomas Pogge) is “Parochialism, Plutocracy, Philanthropy and Global Justice: A Dialogue” (Journal of Global Ethics, 2025). His other research articles are published in India Review, Economic and Political Weekly, and Journal of Global Ethics. He is a recipient of the ICSSR Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2022-24).

Dr Saumyashree Ghosh

Dr Saumyashree Ghosh is a historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean worlds, working at the intersections of law, religion, politics, and political theory, across the early modern and modern eras. Trained in historical and the social sciences, she holdsa PhD in History from Princeton University (2023) and is a research affiliate at Yale Law School where she’s also been a postdoctoral fellow. Her first book-in-progress draws upon her doctoral work on South India. Being home to one of the longest histories of Muslims under non-Muslim (Hindu) rule, South Indian coastal regions offer her an excellent setting to rethink the relationship between Muslim communities and state power in South Asia. Besides this, a long-standing interest in law and economic life takes her to other book-projects, also under way, one on Modern South Asia’s bazaar economy and another on slave trading vessels in the Indian Ocean.

Beyond individual research, she is also collaborating on multiple projects with colleagues across the U.K., India, and the U.S., to think afresh about law and politics in the oceanic worlds, contemporary South Asia, and across colonial peripheries of empires, both European and otherwise.

Dr Koyel Lahiri 

Dr Koyel Lahiri earned an MPhil and a PhD from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, granted by Jadavpur University. Her doctoral research, supported by fellowships from the ICSSR and DAAD, looked at informal workers in India and their politics at two sites of work: the hawker in the city and industrial workers at factories. The thesis was titled Experience, Aspirations and Organisation: Politics of informal workers in post-1990s India. She graduated with a B.A. Honours in English (Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University) and has an M.A. in Globalisation and Labour (a former Global Labour University programme at TISS, Mumbai).

She is currently developing her first book project, drawing from the PhD research. While holding on to the ethnographically generated details of the two cases studied and the central argument that a worker’s politics stems from their threefold relationship with work-i.e. With work at the worksite, and the social and selfhood aspects of the working experience- she is trying to expand the scope of how she can read the latter two registers of that relationship.

This includes contemplating epistemological frameworks, and thinking through the methodological possibilities for academic meaning making so that it can draw from multiple analytic and epistemological frameworks. For example, can the poetic, intuitive understanding of work as ‘purpose’ (as opposed to work as ‘job’) be included in an academic text alongside a political economic discussion around work? Can we hold together the material and the ephemeral with equal elegance and rigour? The goal is to arrive at a kind of knowledge, in the manuscript, that feels both grounded and ‘true’; and intuitively persuasive, and in so doing, making it relevant to the building of a meaningful workers’ movement that is able to speak to the multiple cascading urgencies of the present.

Dr Meenu Deswal 

Dr Meenu Deswal is a historian of Modern South Asia. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, and an MA and MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her research broadly focuses on histories of social change, the law, and labor in rural communities in nineteenth and twentieth century North India. Currently she is working on a project on colonial jurisprudence and the regulation of rural women’s labor and conjugality in colonial Punjab.

Prior to joining the Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Studies, she worked as an Editorial Assistant for the Comparative Studies in Society and History journal. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies; the Race, Law and History Program, and the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies, University of Michigan.