Faculty Grants, New Books and Awards

RESEARCH Faculty Grants, New Books and Awards

Each year, the Mittal Institute supports faculty research projects with grants to fund scholars from a variety of fields, disciplines and regions whose research relates to South Asia.

Faculty Grants

Each year, the Mittal Institute supports research projects that bring together faculty from different fields and regions whose scholarship relates to South Asia. Traditionally, the Mittal Institute has prioritized interdisciplinary research, as well as projects that catalyze connectivity between scholars at Harvard and those in South Asia. For the 2022-2023 academic year, the Institute awarded the highest number of grantees in the organization’s history with over $130,000 in funding. 2022-23 recipients include:

Satchit Balsari, Caroline Buckee A Data Repository for Disaster Response in India

Homi Bhabha The Right to Interpretation

Caleb Dresser Climate Change, Health Security and Emergency Care in India: An Exploratory Evaluation Asim Ijaz Khwaja Increasing Salience to Rebuild the Social Compact: Urban Service Delivery and Property Taxes in Pakistan

Jinah Kim Mapping Color in History in Action: Mobile Heritage Lab for Scientific Analysis of Paintings in India

Gabriel Kreindler Measuring Spatial Frictions in Urban Labor Markets in the Bangladesh ReadyMade Garment Sector

Elizabeth Levey, Alexandra Harrison A feasibility Study of the Building Baby Brains Training Program for Health Workers in Rural Pakistan

Mashail Malik Who Owns the City? Migration, Ownership and Urban Ethnic Parties in Karachi

Rahul Mehrotra The State of Architecture in South Asia Venki Murthy Scienspur: Building a better society through STEM education

Gautam Nair Financial Politics in Contemporary India

Vikram Patel Evaluating the Preliminary Impacts, Feasibility, Acceptability, and Sustainability of MeWeSports: A Sports-mediated Substance-use Prevention Program in Adolescents in India

Ajay K. Singh Education to Combat Vaccine Hesitancy

Kristen Stilt Halal Animals: Food, Faith, and the Future of Planetary Health

Adaner Usmani The History of Punishment in India

Kavishwar Wagholikar Feasibility of Deploying an Open-source Analytical Platform for Electronic Health Records in India

New Books

Book Award

Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind

Tarun Khanna and Geoffrey Jones

This past February, Professors Tarun Khanna and Geoffrey Jones, of Harvard Business School, released the print edition of their book, Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind. The book was published by Penguin Books and is available in India.

Society tends to glorify the get-rich-quick entrepreneur who builds a company, takes it public and then (maybe) contributes to charity. In Leadership to Last, Jones and Khanna interview iconic leaders in India who have demonstrated leadership to last, including Ratan Tata, Anu Aga, Adi Godrej, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Devi Shetty and Rahul Bajaj. The authors corroborate how these stories are less about building a get-rich-quick organization and much more about triggering foundational and institutional change in society.

The Kinetic City & Other Essays

Rahul Mehrotra

Rahul Mehrotra, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and founder of the Mumbai- and Boston-based RMA Architects, released a new book in 2021 entitled The Kinetic City & Other Essays. The book presents his writings over the last 30 years and illustrates his long-term engagement with urbanism in India and his work which has given rise to a new conceptualization of the city–a concept he calls the “Kinetic City.” In contrast to the static way in which the city is conventionally depicted on maps, he argues that cities are kinetic and should be perceived, read and mapped in terms of patterns of occupation and associative values attributed to space.

Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought

Durba Mitra

Durba Mitra, a professor at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was awarded the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies. The prize honors “outstanding and innovative scholarship across discipline and country of specialization for a first single-authored monograph on South Asia.” Indian Sex Life, which demonstrates how ideas of deviant female sexuality became foundational to modern social thought, also received an honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize from the Law & Society Association. Mitra works at the intersection of feminist and queer studies and her scholarship spans analysis of the history of sexuality in the Global South, histories of science and social science and the politics of gender in the colonial and postcolonial world.