ICI Announces Two New Academic Directors

The New School has named Mark Frazier, professor of politics, and Sanjay Reddy, associate professor of economics, academic directors of the India China Institute (ICI), a leading center of trans-regional study. Frazier and Reddy will develop the ICI’s exploration of the relationships between India, China and the United States by launching new research programs and partnerships between The New School and other global institutions.

“Discussions of relations between China and India tend to assume that their future will be one of either cooperation or conflict,” said Frazier. “ICI programming and research present a more complex picture of the dense networks and lively exchange of ideas and technologies among Chinese and Indians. This understudied pattern of mutual, non-state exchanges has been a recurring theme over the past two millennia.”

Founded by The New School in 2004, ICI supports research, teaching and discussion on the relationships between India and China, two of the world’s emerging economic and political powers, and their interactions with the United States. Directed by Ashok Gurung, ICI is the hub of a robust international network of scholars, leaders, and opinion-makers, which encourages discussion and exchange through fellowships, courses, public events, publications, and inter-institutional collaboration. ICI has recently hosted visits from leading international voices including Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai of Nepal; Nirupama Rao, Indian Ambassador to the United States; and authors Liao Yiwu, Philip Gourevitch and Salman Rushdie.

“India and China represent rising nations states and civilizational spaces which scholarship and teaching in the United States cannot afford to ignore,” said Reddy. “They are jointly reshaping the world economy, polity and society.”

To his new role, Mark Frazier brings two decades of research on political economy and labor politics in China and on Chinese-Indian relations. Frazier, who most recently served as ConocoPhillips Professor of Chinese Politics and director of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, earned his PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell, 2010) and The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution and Labor Management (Cambridge, 2002). A former journalist, Frazier’s work for Roll Call was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Sanjay Reddy has served at The New School for Social Research in 2009. His research focuses on global political economy, development and poverty, with a particular focus on contemporary India. In addition to having taught at Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard, from which he earned his PhD in economics, Reddy has consulted for development agencies and institutions like Oxfam, UNICEF and the World Bank. He is the author of Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? (Routledge, 2011) and International Trade and Labor Standards: A Proposal for Linkage (Columbia, 2008).

This fall the ICI will also welcome five fellows in Social Innovation for Sustainable Environments. Hailing from India, China and the United States, the fellows will conduct and present research and instruct New School courses.

The 2012 Social Innovation for Sustainable Environments Fellows are:
Dong Shikui, Professor at the School of Environment, Beijing Normal University (China)
Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, Professor and Head of the Centre for Development and Environment Policy, Public Policy and Management, India Institute of Management, Calcutta (India)
Sanjay Chaturvedi, Professor of Political Science, Punjab University, Chandigarh (India)
Victorial Marshall, Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Parsons The New School for Design (USA)
Nidhi Srinivas, Associate Professor of Nonprofit Management, the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School (USA)