Principal Investigators

Professor Helen Siu (Department of Anthropology, Council on East Asian Studies)

Professor Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (Department of Anthropology, India and South Asian Studies Council, Forestry and Environmental Studies)

 

Affiliated Faculty

Professor Eric Harms (Department of Anthropology, Council on Southeast Asian Studies)

Professor Chloe Starr (Divinity School, Council on East Asian Studies)

Professor Rohit De (Department of History)

Professor Peter Perdue (Emeritus, Department of History, Council on East Asian Studies)

 

Staff

Yukiko Tonoike is an Associate Research Scientist and Coordinator for the Yale InterAsia Initiative. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in December 2009, where she focused on Near Eastern prehistory.  Her main research interests are understanding human interaction patterns from the objects that have been left behind and using technology to analyze, interpret, archive, collaborate, and present research data.

 

Research Affiliates

Gao Yufang (Ph.D. in Conservation and Anthropology, Yale University)
Dr. Yufang Gao is an environmental anthropologist and conservation scientist affiliated with the Yale InterAsia Initiative. He holds a B.S. in Biology from Peking University, an M.S. in Environmental Science from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Environment from Yale University. His work focuses on the ecological, social, and cultural dimensions of human-wildlife coexistence. He has dedicated significant time to fieldwork on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas, collaborating with international, national, and local conservation NGOs on various wildlife conservation projects and conducting long-term ethnographic studies. He has also researched and published papers on the illegal elephant ivory trade from Africa to China. His work has been recognized by the National Geographic Emerging Explorers Award, the Marsh Award for Terrestrial Conservation Leadership, the Roy A. Rappaport Prize in Environmental Anthropology, and the Yale Graduate School Public Scholar Award, among others. His current research examines the environmental, social, and religious transitions at Mount Kailash, known as Gang Rinpoche in Tibetan, one of the most sacred sites on the border between China, Nepal, and India.

 

Previous Postdoctoral Affiliates

2019-2021
Dr. Neelam Khoja is a transregional and transdisciplinary historian. She graduated from the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department at Harvard and holds two master’s degrees in Islamic Studies from Claremont Graduate University and Harvard Divinity School. Khoja’s research focuses on historically marginalized communities whose networks cross imperial boundaries and national borders from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Khoja investigates how cultural and social politics melds literature, religion, and the production of sovereignty in the transregional and transnational spaces in present-day Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. She is fluent in languages, literatures, cultures, and histories within and across these borders. Her research has been recognized and supported by numerous grants and fellowships including the Mahindra Humanities Center Interdisciplinary Dissertation Completion Fellowship at Harvard University, Fulbright, and American Institutes of Indian, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iranian Studies. At Yale, Khoja is working on her first monograph, Known Geographies: Afghan Societies, Sovereigns, and Space in Iran and Hindustan, 1450-1880. Khoja has published articles in peer-reviewed journals: “Historical Mistranslations: Identity, Slavery, and Genre in Eighteenth-Century India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (forthcoming Fall 2020) and “Competing Sovereignties in Eighteenth-Century South Asia: Afghan Claims to Kingship.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 4 (June 16, 2020): 555–81.

2018-2019
Sakura Christmas was the SSRC Transregional Fellow at Yale Inter-Asia Connections Program. She is an assistant professor of History and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Her research concerns the history of borderlands, environment, and imperialism in East Asia in the twentieth century. She received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2016. During her sabbatical, she will be a postdoctoral scholar at the InterAsia Connections Program and an affiliate fellow at the Agrarian Studies Program. While at Yale, she will be completing her first monograph, Nomadic Borderlands: Imperial Japan and the Origins of Ethnic Autonomy in China. Her book project focuses on the Japanese-led demarcation of a nomadic borderland between Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the 1930s. Drawing on archival research in both Japan and China, Nomadic Borderlands examines how Japanese occupiers pursued radical solutions in population transfers and environmental planning to separate out their subjects by ethnicity and livelihood. Instead of only seeing the origins of Communist rule as forged in the fires of war against imperialism, she argues for the significance of the Japanese occupation in shaping the ethnic and ecological bounds of modern China.

2016-2017
Debojyoti Das was the InterAsia postdoctoral fellow and is an anthropologist of South Asia, focusing on the borderlands of eastern India and the Indian Ocean. His work is interdisciplinary, bridging his training as an ethnographer with archival research and extensive use of visual media and oral sources. His current research focuses on sustainable development and disaster risk reduction policy issues in the Indian Ocean coastal world through critical study of community museums, visual arts, folk paintings and in-depth participatory research.

2015-2016
James Pickett was the InterAsia postdoctoral associate and specializes in the history of empire and Islamic authority. His first book project explores transregional networks of Persianate exchange among religious scholars in Bukhara during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Related articles also trace the cultural memory of this era as a subsequent influence on Soviet propaganda in Iran and language ideology in Central Eurasia. James’ second project will compare Bukhara’s transformation into a Russian protectorate with the Indian princely state of Hyderabad’s parallel trajectory into semi-colonial status. He teaches a seminar entitled “Islam and Empire in Central / South Asia.” James received his Ph.D. from Princeton (2015) and is concurrently an assistant professor in the history department at the University of Pittsburgh.

2013-2014
Rajashree Mazumder (InterAsia Postdoctoral Associate, South Asian Studies Council)
Rajashree Mazumder received her Ph.D. in Spring 2013 from the Department of History at University of California, Los Angeles.  Her dissertation is titled: “Constructing the Indian Immigrant to Colonial Burma 1885-1948.” Beyond India and Burma, her research interests relate to networks of circulation: people, commodities and ideas in the Indian Ocean region both in the early modern and the modern period. As a postdoctoral associate and lecturer at Yale University, she taught a seminar course: “Migration in the Indian Ocean Region.” Beginning academic year 2014-15, she will be joining Union College, NY as an Assistant Professor of History. Select publications include: “I Do Not Envy You: Mixed Marriages and Immigration Debates in the 1920s and 1930s Rangoon, Burma” in Indian Economic and Social History Review (IESHR, March 2015).

Chika Watanabe (InterAsia Postdoctoral Associate, Council on East Asian Studies)
Chika Watanabe holds a PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University, where she researched Japanese NGO aid in Myanmar. She is currently working on her book manuscript, The Muddy Labor of Aid: Moral Imaginaries of Sustainable Development Across Asia. Her research interests include development and humanitarian aid, sustainability, religion/secularity, questions of personhood, and issues of morality and ethics. While keeping an eye on Myanmar, her next major project will examine aid practices and disaster preparedness in the aftermath of the March 2011 disasters in Japan. As of August 2014, she has been a permanent Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester (UK).