Tuesday, April 16th, 2019 Beyond the Headlines: India, Pakistan and the Kashmir Crisis

Description

Joseph McQuade is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute’s Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, with a dissertation that examined the origins of terrorism in colonial South Asia in international perspective. This research is currently being revised into a book manuscript, tentatively titled Anti-colonial nationalism and the birth of ‘terrorism’ in colonial India, 1857-1947. His postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto will interrogate the role of terrorism and insurgency in defining national identity in postcolonial India and Burma (Myanmar). His broader research and teaching interests include critical genealogies of ‘terrorism’ as a political and legal category, the global history of political violence, and the relationship between insurgency and nation-states.

Kanta Murali is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include comparative political economy of development, Indian politics, politics of growth and economic policy, state-business relations and labor policy. Her Ph.D. dissertation (“Economic Liberalization, Electoral Coalitions and Private Investment in India”) at Princeton University aims to understand the political conditions favourable to growth-oriented policies in poor democracies by focusing on a specific empirical puzzle related to India. It examines sub-national policy variation in the competition for private investment in India after the country undertook market reforms in 1991 and analyzes the political factors behind why some subnational governments have been more pro-active in undertaking investment promotion policies than their counterparts.

Jaby Mathew is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto. Mathew received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto and he is currently revising his doctoral dissertation “Representation in the Shadow of Colonialism: Conceptions of Political Representation in 19th and 20th Century India” into a book manuscript. Mathew’s research focuses on modern Indian thought, contemporary democratic theory, and postcolonial theory with particular attention to the ethics of comparison and translation.

Christoph Emmrich is Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Asian Institute; Associate Professor for South and Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department for Historical Studies and is Chair of the UofT/McMaster Numata Buddhist Studies Program. His research bridges Southeast and South Asia as it engages with fields as diverse as Burmese and Nepalese Buddhism, and Tamil Jainism.