Penn Calendar Penn A-Z School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania

Raka Sen

CASI is pleased to announce Raka Sen as a Sobti Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) for the 2023–24 academic year.

Raka joins CASI as a Ph.D. student in sociology. Her research interests span environmental, labor, urban, gender, migration, and development studies. Situated at the intersection of all of these subjects, Raka's work looks to understand how climate change and development is reshaping the everyday lives of local people in the Sundarban region of India and Bangladesh.

Rashi Sabherwal

CASI is pleased to announce Rashi Sabherwal as a Sobti Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) for the 2023–24 academic year.

Rashi joins CASI as a Ph.D. student in Comparative Politics. Her research agenda lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus in South Asia. She is particularly interested in studying women's political participation and their demands on the state using field experiments, surveys, and in-depth qualitative fieldwork.

Shades of Grey: India, the US, and the Quad

Aditi Malhotra
Monday, May 22, 2023

India’s security ties with the United States have traditionally commanded attention within the broader context of India’s foreign affairs. Although Indo-US security cooperation has matured over the last two decades in quantitative and qualitative terms, it takes a few dull moments for commentators to write the obituary of India-US relations. The oscillation between the extremes of “strong ties” and “frosty relations” makes it difficult to grasp the real-world complexities or the underlying phenomenon at play.

Monika Arora

Professor Monika Arora is a public health scientist working in the area of Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) Prevention and Control and Adolescent Health. She is Vice President (Research) at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). She also serves on the board of HRIDAY (Health Related Information Dissemination Amongst Youth), an NGO working with and for adolescents, patients, and the community. She is the President-Elect of the NCD Alliance (2021-23), Chairperson of the South East Asia NCD Alliance (2020-23), and a Founding Governing Board member of the Healthy India Alliance.

India in the Indo-Pacific: Leveraging a “Low-Resolution” Liberal Order

Kate Sullivan de Estrada
Monday, May 8, 2023

The most recent Summit-level meeting of the four Quad nations—Australia, Japan, India, and the United States—in March 2023 began with a familiar refrain: “Our meeting today reaffirms the Quad’s steadfast commitment to supporting a free and open Indo-Pacific.” 

Crossroads and Conscience: Streets as Political Spaces in Kerala

S. Harikrishnan
Monday, April 24, 2023

In an interesting part of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), the protagonist (an ordinary clerk), distraught at being dehumanized and treated like “an invisible” by a high-ranking officer, decides to take revenge. He spends months trying to plot the perfect way to get back at the officer before coming up with “the most marvellous” idea: to confront the officer on Nevsky Prospect, a central street in St. Petersburg, where the clerk often spotted—and had stepped aside for—the officer in the past.

Jitender Swami

Before coming to Penn, Jitender Swami worked as an Academic (Research & Teaching) Associate at the Indian Institute of Management Amritsar in the Department of Economics. Previously, he was a Writing Urban India Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, India, and a Research Intern at Hyderabad Urban Lab.

Financial Inclusion Policies in India: Reinforcing Profit from Gender Inequity

Smitha Radhakrishnan
Monday, April 10, 2023

Microfinance, the practice of lending to groups of vulnerable women without collateral, continues to dominate India’s financial news. Sizable new investments in the sector come from both domestic and global capital sources.