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 Samyak Ghosh

Dr Samyak Ghosh is a cultural historian of premodern South Asia. His geographical area of research includes the present-day northeast of India, Indo-Tibetan borderlands, and the Eastern Himalayan Region. He was trained a scholar of history and literature first at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (2012-2014) and then in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), Columbia University (2015-2022). He was awarded the Kumkum Chatterjee Memorial Award in Indian History and the Junior Research Fellowship by the American Institute of Indian Studies in 2019-2020. He is currently completing a monograph titled, “Formations of the King: The Practice of Political Culture in the Contact Zones of Hindustan, 1700-1850”. The book intervenes in the fields of kingship studies, premodern South Asia, Mughal studies, court studies, critical caste studies, and South Asian religions. Apart from working on his first monograph, Samyak is working on a bunch of articles on the cultural, political, and legal history of early eighteenth-century South Asia and two translation projects where he is translating fiction and non-fiction from modern Assamese to English.