Karen Barkey is professor of sociology and history and director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. She studies state centralization/decentralization, state control, and social movements against states in the context of empires. In her recent work she has also explored the issue of toleration and accommodation in premodern empires. Her research focuses primarily on the Ottoman Empire and, recently, on comparisons between the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Roman Empires. Her first book, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization, studies the way in which the Ottoman state found new strategies of control and managed to incorporate potentially contentious forces into the Ottoman polity; it was awarded the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award for outstanding book of the year in social science history in 1995. Her recent book, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective, is a comparative study of different forms and moments of imperial organization and diversity. Empire of Difference was awarded the 2009 Barrington Moore Award from the Comparative Historical Sociology section at American Sociology Association and the 2009 J. David Greenstone Book Prize from the Politics and History section at the Political Science Association.
Rajeev Bhargava, B.A. (Delhi), M. Phil, D. Phil (Oxford), is senior fellow and director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He was formerly professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and, between 2001 and 2005, professor of political theory and head of the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. He has held visiting fellowships at Harvard, Columbia, Jerusalem, Bristol, and Paris. He is on the advisory board of several institutions and programs and was a consultant to the UNDP report on cultural liberty. His publications include
Individualism in Social Science;
Secularism and Its Critics;
What Is Political Theory and Why do We Need It? and
The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy.
Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, director of the South Asia Institute, and a faculty member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. Professor Bilgrami is the former chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1994–98 and the director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities from 2004–2011. He has two relatively independent sets of intellectual interests—in the philosophy of mind and language and in political philosophy and moral psychology, especially as they surface in politics, history, and culture. His books include Belief and Meaning; Self Knowledge and Resentment; and Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment.
Ira Katznelson, Columbia University’s Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, is president of the Social Science Research Council. His books include Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time; Liberal Beginnings: A Republic for the Moderns (coauthored with Andreas Kalyvas); When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America; and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. He was president of the American Political Science Association for 2005–2006.
Sudipta Kaviraj is a professor of Indian politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. His research interests include Indian social and political thought, modern Indian literature and cultural production, the historical sociology of the Indian state, and the history of Western social theory. He received his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His books include The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India; Civil Society: History and Possibilities, coedited with Sunil Khilnani; and The Imaginary Institution of India. He is also the author of the classic article “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,” which appeared in the European Journal of Sociology. Before joining Columbia University, he was chair of the Department of Political Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has also taught political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University and was an Agatha Harrison Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
Salman Rushie is the author of eleven novels including
Grimus,
Midnight’s Children, (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981),
Shame,
The Satanic Verses,
Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
The Moor’s Last Sigh,
Shalimar the Clown,
The Enchantress of Florence, and
Luca and the Fire of Life. He is also the author of a book of stories and four works of nonfiction:
Imaginary Homelands,
The Jaguar Smile,
Step Across This Line, and
Joseph Anton—A Memoir. His books have been translated into over forty languages. A fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Salman Rushie has received, among other honors, the Whitbread Prize for best novel (twice), the Writer’s Guild Award, and the James Joyce Award of University College Dublin. In addition,
Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker—the best winner in the award’s forty-year history—by a public vote. As an advocate of toleration, Rushdie has been honored with the Freedom of the City awards by Mexico City; Strausbourg, Vienna; and El Paso, Texas, and the Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union. He served as president of the PEN American Center (2004–2006) and continues to work as chairman of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival, which he helped to create.
Alfred Stepan is the Wallace Sayre Professor of Government, co-director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion, and former co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. He is a specialist on comparative democratization in the modern world and has taught at Oxford, Yale, and Central European University. His books include Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies, with Juan Linz and Yogendra Yadav; Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation with Juan Linz; and The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil. He also has edited two volumes published by Columbia University Press, Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey and Democracy and Islam in Indonesia. His thirteen books and edited volumes have been translated into more than a dozen languages including Chinese, Farsi, and Indonesian. In 2012 Professor Stepan received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Political Science Association for his work in cross-disciplinary research. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy.
Charles Taylor is emeritus professor of philosophy at McGill University. Professor Taylor was the 2007 Templeton Prize recipient for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities. He was the first Canadian to win the Templeton Prize. In 2008 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the arts and philosophy category. Among other books Dr. Taylor has written are
Hegel; Hegel and Modern Society; Philosophical Papers (2 vols.);
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity; The Malaise of Modernity (the Massey Lectures, reprinted in the United States as
The Ethics of Authenticity);
Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition; Philosophical Arguments; A Catholic Modernity? and the award-winning
A Secular Age.
Nadia Urbinati is the Kyriakos Tsakopolous Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies at Columbia University. She specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and antidemocratic traditions. In 2008 the president of the Italian Republic awarded Professor Urbinati as Commendatore della Repubblica (Commander of the Italian Republic) “for her contribution to the study of democracy and the diffusion of Italian liberal and democratic thought abroad.” She is the author of Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy; Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government; and is presently coediting Condorcet’s Political Writing with Steven Lukes. She is also an editorial contributor to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and publishes articles in the culture section of the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.
Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has published widely on education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief, which won the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America, and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. She is coeditor of the book series South Asia Across the Disciplines published jointly by the Columbia, Chicago, and California university presses. She is also the editor of Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. She has received Guggenheim, NEH, and Mellon fellowships and has been a fellow at various inernational research institutes. Her current work is on modern occultism and the writing of alternative religious hisories.