Thursday, September 12, 2024
5:30pm - 7:00pm EST
Harvard, CGIS South, Belfer Room S020
Ali Riaz is a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Politics and Government. He held the Thomas E Eimermann Professorship (2018-2020). His research interests are: democratization, violent extremism. Political Islam, South Asian politics and Bangladeshi politics. Riaz held the University Professor designation between 2012 and 2018, and was the Chair of the Department of Politics between 2007 and 2017. He is a nonresident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council. Riaz is the President of The American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS).
Nusrat S. Chowdhury is an anthropologist interested in questions of politics and mediation, particularly in the entanglement of popular sovereignty and political communication. Her recent interests include political affect, populism, rumor, infrastructural development, and democracy. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during 2020-21. Her first book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford University Press, 2019), is an ethnography of the crowd. Her current book project explores the entanglements of sovereignty and sacrifice in the lived materiality of populist authoritarianism, or what she loosely describes as "infrastructural populism." She is the book review editor (South Asia) of the Journal of Asian Studies and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. During 2020-23, she served as an elected member of the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.
Dr. Daniel Markey is a senior advisor on South Asia at the United States Institute of Peace. He is also a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Foreign Policy Institute.
From 2015-2021, Dr. Markey was a senior research professor in international relations at SAIS, where he launched and led the Master of Arts in Global Policy degree program and taught courses in international politics and policy. From 2007-2015, Dr. Markey was a senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2003 to 2007, Dr. Markey was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. His work focused on U.S. strategy in South Asia, especially Pakistan and India. Prior to government service, he taught in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and served as executive director of Princeton’s Research Program in International Security. Earlier, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.
Dr. Markey has two decades of academic, think tank, and government experience focused on international relations and U.S. policy in Asia, with a particular focus on South Asia and China’s evolving role in the region. Dr. Markey earned his bachelor’s in international relations from Johns Hopkins and his doctorate in politics from Princeton.
Dr. Markey is the author of China’s Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book assesses the evolving political, economic, and security links between China and its western neighbors, including Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. He is also the author of No Exit from Pakistan: America’s Tortured Relationship with Islamabad (Cambridge University Press, 2013) as well as numerous reports, articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces. His commentary has been featured widely in U.S. and international media.