Pratap Bhanu Mehta is Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University, a position he began on July 1, 2017. Previously, he was President of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, one of India’s most distinguished think tanks; Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University; and Associate Professor of Government and of Social Studies at Harvard University. He has also done extensive public policy work. He was Member-Convenor of the Prime Minister of India’s National Knowledge Commission; member of the Supreme Court appointed commission on regulating Indian universities, and the author of a number of reports for leading Government of India and international agencies. He is on the Board of Governors of the International Development Research Centre. He is also on the Editorial Board of numerous journals including the American Political Science Review, Journal of Democracy and India and Global Affairs.
Atul Kohli is the David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His principal research interests are in the areas of comparative political economy with a focus on the developing countries. He is the author of Poverty amid Plenty in the New India (2012) (a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2012 on Asia and the Pacific); State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (winner of the Charles Levine Award (2005) of the International Political Science Association); Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability (1991); The State and Poverty in India (1987).
Sudipta Kaviraj is Professor, Indian Politics and Intellectual History, Columbia University. He is a specialist in intellectual history and Indian politics. He works on two fields of intellectual history - Indian social and political thought in the 19th and 20th centuries and modern Indian literature and cultural production. His other fields of interest and research include the historical sociology of the Indian state, and some aspects of Western social theory. Prior to joining Columbia University, he taught at the Department of Political Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Mukulika Banerjee is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, and Director, South Asia Centre, The London School of Economics and Political Science, and Member of CASI's IAB. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Cultivating Democracy based on 15 years of ethnographic data of rural voters and their multivalent engagement with elections and voting activities in West Bengal, India. Her most recent book Why India Votes? (Routledge 2014), the outcome of a major ESRC Grant, breaks several new grounds both conceptually and methodologically.