Friday, September 13, 2024
2:00pm - 4:00pm EST
Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St
Following the event, join us for a reception with food and drinks, offering a chance to interact with participants in an informal setting.
Yamini Aiyar is currently Senior Visiting Fellow, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia and Watson Institute, Brown University. She was the President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research, a leading multidisciplinary think tank in New Delhi from 2017-2024. Yamini's work sits at the intersection of research and policy practice. During her tenure she spearheaded the establishment of two important new research initiatives within CPR on State capacity and Politics. Prior to becoming President she set up the Accountability Initiative at CPR known for its work on governance, social accountability and expenditure tracking in social Policy. Yamini's research interests span the fields of contemporary politics, state capacity, welfare policy, federalism and India's political economy. Yamini sits on a number of boards and advisory committees of research centers and non-profits. Her recent policy commitments include: Advisory Committee, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University; Member, United Nations Committee of the Experts on Public Administration; Council Member, United Nations University, Member; Chief Minister’s Rajasthan Economic Transformation Advisory Council (2022-2023); Member, Expert Group to Recommend Medium - Long Term Post Covid Strategy for Punjab, Government of Punjab (2021-22); General Body Member, Delhi Board of School Education, Government of Delhi; Advisory Board, Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Yamini has published widely both in academic and current affairs journals and newspapers including the Economist, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, Indian Express, The Hindu. She has a regular column in the Hindustan Times and Deccan Herald, two leading mainstream newspapers in India. Her forthcoming book, "Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi Schools" will be published in October 2024 by Oxford University Press.
Pradeep Chhibber studies the political parties, party systems, representation, and the politics of South Asia. He has written Righteous Demagogues: Populist Politics in South Asia and Beyond, Oxford University Press, 2024 (with Adnan Naseemullah); India Tomorrow: Conversations with Next Generation Leaders, Oxford University Press, 2020 (with Harsh Shah); Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party System of India, Oxford University Press, 2018 (with Rahul Verma); Religious Practice and Democracy in India, Cambridge University Press, 2014 (with Sandeep Shastri); The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Britain, Canada, India, and the U.S., Princeton University Press, 2004 (with Ken Kollman); and Democracy without Association: Transformation of Party Systems and Social Cleavages in India, University of Michigan Press 1999.
Pradeep received an M.A. and an M.Phil. from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. from UCLA. He is the Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Gilles Verniers is currently a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and Karl Loewenstein Fellow & Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science at Amherst College. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Political Sciences and Co-Director of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, which he founded, at Ashoka University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris in 2016 and has trained in Political Science, International Relations, and Economic and Social Ethics at the universities of St. Louis, Brussels, and at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He is a Research Associate at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.
Prof. Verniers' research focuses on a prosopography of India’s political class, questions of political representation, and the intersections between electoral politics, state, and local governance in India. His doctoral dissertations focused on the transformation of the political class of the state of Uttar Pradesh and the localization of electoral politics.
As Co-Director of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, he led an effort in building public datasets on Indian elections and public actors, including elected representatives and candidates to elections, political parties, national, and state cabinets, the top cadres of India’s central bureaucracy and the higher judiciary.
His areas of longstanding interest and research commitment focus on questions of representation, particularly of women, castes and minorities across public institutions. He also conducts research on the intersection of gender and local politics, studying the trajectories of women contesting Panchayat elections.
Prof. Verniers is a contributor to a CASI-TCPD project on urban local bodies, a project that aims to build the first open access repository of Indian municipal elections’ results. He is a regular contributor to the editorial pages of The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, The Times of India, The Economic Times, and Scroll. He is based in New Delhi since 2005.
Hilal Ahmed, Associate Professor, works on political Islam, Indian democracy, and the politics of symbols in South Asia. He is associated with the Lokniti programme of the CSDS. His first book, Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation (Routledge, 2014), explores these themes through an interdisciplinary approach to Muslim politics. His recent books, Allah Naam ki Siyasat (Setu Prakashan, 2023), Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islam in India (Penguin Random House, 2019), and Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (with Peter R. deSouza and Sanjeer Alam, Bloomsbury, 2019), further elaborate on these themes, focusing on contemporary Muslim political discourse in India. Ahmed has also edited several key volumes, including Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience, Fragility, Ambivalence (Routledge, 2021) and Rethinking Muslim Personal Law: Issues, Debates, and Reforms (Routledge, 2022). He is currently working on a book about Muslim political representation in postcolonial India. Ahmed serves as the Associate Editor of South Asian Studies and is part of the editorial team of CSDS’s Hindi journal Pratiman. His academic experience includes Visiting Professorships and Fellowships at institutions such as Krea University, the Institute of Advanced Studies-Nantes, and Victoria University Wellington. In addition to his academic publications, Ahmed has produced two documentaries and co-developed the SHARC-DILLI mobile app, focused on the Partitioned City of Delhi. He holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2007), and has been awarded several prestigious fellowships, including the IAS-Nantes Fellowship and the Asia Fellow Award.