Elisabeth Andersson
Sanskrit language and literature
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Sonal Acharya
Hindi, Urdu

Ellen Boccuzzi
Southeast Asian Studies
Ellen Boccuzzi’s research focuses on Thailand and Mainland Southeast Asia, with specializations in migration studies (internal and transnational), urbanization in the developing world, and Thai literature. She is currently based in Thailand, where she is writing a dissertation on contemporary Thai literature about rural-urban migration to Bangkok. This study has two primary objectives: first, to highlight the large (and growing) body of Thai migration literature and to define this as a genre that stands alongside other national and transnational literatures of migration; and second, to use this body of work as a tool to better understand the ways in which migration, urbanization, and globalization are impacting the individual and society in Thailand today.
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Prudence Bruns
Tamil

Trang Cao
Southeast Asian Studies
Interests: the rich corpus of the New Poetry Movement (1932-1945); the shape and implications of literary influence, reception and localization--foreign-isms adapted and subverted; comparative literature. Contemporary Vietnamese Literature with focus on poetry and translation issues.

Bergliot Chiarucci
Sanskrit

Ruprekha Chowdhury
Hindi-Urdu

Jennifer Clare
History of Tamil commentaries; Medieval South India; the Pundit Project
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Rebekah Collins
Southeast Asian Studies
Contemporary Vietnamese literature and film; the modern girl and the(post) modern woman; colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial desires; reformations and deformations of urban and rural space; everyday and extraordinary time in aesthetic and cultural production; historical and futurist imagination in modern Viet Nam.
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Huma Dar
Hindi, Urdu
H. Dar was the organizer of the feminist conference, Boundaries in Question: 2002, on the theme of Women and War, at U.C. Berkeley. Dar is a published poet and has taught courses at Berkeley, including India Through the Writer's Eyes, India and Cinematic (Imagi)Nation: the Courtesan and the Mother, Modern Urdu Prose: Partition Narratives, and Women and Media at San Francisco State University. Dar was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award and the Teaching Effectiveness Award at Berkeley. Her work is focused on the intersections and co-formations of gender, religion, class, caste, sexuality, and national politics of South Asia, specifically analyzing the cinematic, literary, and political representations of Muslims in India. Dar has been a member of the Executive Board of Directors of Narika– a South Asian women's organization that runs a helpline for victims of domestic violence in the Bay Area. She has also been active in the parents' rights issues at U.C. Berkeley, and is the co-author of the University of California's Family Policy. Upcoming Publications: An article tentatively titled "Can A Muslim be an Indian and not a Traitor or a Terrorist?" to be published by Routledge in 2007/8 in Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, edited by Professor Kelly Pemberton. Translations of two Urdu poems to be published by Penguin in 2007, in an anthology on Lucknow edited by Professor Veena Oldenburg. Two entries, "Women, Gender and Women Film Directors and Film Stars: South Asia" and "Women, Gender and Representations of Sexualities and Gender in Film: South Asia," Encyclopaedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, EWIC. Vol. 5/6. Leiden: Brill. To be published in 2008.

Sneha Desai
Hindi, Urdu

Kevin Dixon
Indonesian

Elizabeth (Lisa) Encisco
Tamil
I am interested in historical linguistics with an emphasis on the semantic  and morphosyntactic development of certain verbal complexes (serial verb  constructions) as found in both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian.  My dissertation  will present empirical discoveries, as well as adopt a fresh theoretical  approach that will help us better understand how the serial verb  construction increasingly became a site for expressing greater degrees of  "speaker evaluation"--an unusual phenomenon for these constructions  world-wide, but common to the languages of South Asia.  Other areas of  interest include the descriptive techniques employed in the traditional  Indian grammatical texts; and the interdependence between cultural values  and their textual expression.
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Nikhil Govind
Hindi, Urdu
Interests: Mid 20th century Hindi literature, political  philosophy for South Asia.

Kiran Keshavamurthy
Tamil
I am  looking at modern Tamil fiction, primarily short stories and novels, from the 1960s and 1970s and have been interested by questions of memory and narrative. I am interested in interrogating the shifting boundary between fiction and history in literary texts that represent historical events to investigate the tangled relations between personal recollection and collective memory, language and writing, culture and history, memory and fiction and to explore the political, historical and aesthetic implications of creating alternative histories.

Ian Lowman
Southeast Asian Studies
Cambodian cultural history; medieval and early modern Southeast Asia; perceptions of the foreign in Cambodian arts; Middle Khmer literature; Old Khmer inscriptions.

Preetha Mani
Tamil
Contemporary Indian women's literature,translation studies, gender studies, Hindi, Tamil.
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Carlos Mena
Tamil

Sujata Mody
Hindi-Urdu
Sujata Mody is a doctoral candidate in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. She specializes in modern Hindi literature, theories of gender and nationalism, and language politics in South Asia. Her current research focuses on the role of the prominent Hindi literary journal 'Sarasvati' (1900-1982) in the construction of both a modern Hindi canon and a modern Indian national identity. She has taught Hindi and modern South Asian literature courses as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. She received a B.A. in English and Anthropology from Rice University (1997) and an M.A. from UC Berkeley in South and Southeast Asian Studies (2000).

Annabelle Niebel
Sanskrit
I study Sanskrit, Hindi and a little Tamil. I am interested in religion, particularly Bhakti, devotionalism, and doing comparative studies between the bhakti movements in northern and southern India. I am very interested in bahakti poetry to Krishna and also folklore.
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Luther Obrock
Sanskrit

Gita V. Pai
PhD candidate
Tamil and Sanskrit literature, notions of kingship, representation of women, and material culture of late medieval south India.

• Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellow (2006)
• Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities Fellow (2005)
• Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality (2003)
• M.A. South Asian Studies, UC Berkeley (2002)

Vasudha Paramasivan
Hindi, Urdu

Rahul Parson
Hindi, Urdu

Christopher Plummer
Hindi and Urdu Language, Literary history and Linguistics. Language teaching pedagogy.
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Carlos Pomeda
Sanskrit
Areas of interest: Kashmir Shaivism, Tantra, Yoga traditions, Sanskrit philology
Currently engaged on preliminary work for his dissertation, which involves the translation of three untranslated works within the Krama system of Kashmir Shaivism. These three works, attributed to Arnasimha, Sitikantha and anonymous respectively, share the same title of Mahanaya-Prakasa, a co-incidence that is intriguing in itself and one that needs to be considered. The second phase will consist of a study of the Krama system that draws upon the results of the translations. A careful study of these three texts and their interrelationship should throw light both on the nature and on the evolution of the Krama system, adding one more piece to our current understanding of the field and this little-known school.

Robert Raddock
Sanskrit emphasis
Interests: Main interest is scriptural exegesis. Interests within South and Southeast Asian Studies are Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, modern Hindi literature, and post-colonial history writing. I am currently writing my Ph.D. dissertation on advaita vedanta exegesis of the Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad (BAU). Advaita Vedanta is an important school of Hindu religion and philosophy. The BAU is perhaps the oldest prose Upanishad on which Shankaracarya, the most famous medieval proponent of advaita, has written a commentary. I began graduate work at U.C. Berkeley after studying Sanskrit at the University of Virginia, my undergraduate alma mater, and the Freie Universitaet in Berlin. I have also studied Sanskrit at the Deccan College in Pune and the EFEO in Pondicherry, India. I received a traditionally Jewish yeshiva education in Hebrew Bible and Talmud, both in the U.S. and in Israel, and have studied both fairly intensively at the graduate level in U.S. universities.
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Srinivas Reddy
Areas of Study:Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu
Interests:Buddhist metrics and Dravidian folk stories
He is currently working on a translation of Krishnadevaraya's Telugu classic Amukta Malyada.
Srinivas is also a professional classical sitarist.
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Beatrice Reusch
Sanskrit

Laurie Margot Ross
Sufist elements of Cirebonese (West Java) mask performance and political restraints on its transmission; psychological aspects of the mask; the clown as social critic; oral transmission of the Ramayana and the impact of literacy on its telling.

• Fulbright "Islamic Civilization" fellow (2005)
• Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellow (2006)
• M.A. Performance Studies, New York University, 2002

• "Mask, Gender, and Performance in Indonesia: An Interview with Didik Nini Thowok" in Asian Theatre Journal V.22, no.2 (Fall 2005).
• "Masken - eine Deutung" in Symposion Maske: Figure, Maske, Puppe. Teil 1: Kunst, Politik, Gesellschaft. Berlin, 1985.

Joseph Scalice
Southeast Asian Studies

Scott Schlossberg
Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian

Elizabeth Rani Segran
Tamil

Sophearith Siyonn
Southeast Asian Studies

Michael J. Slouber
Area of Interest: Epic Sanskrit, Saiva Tantra, and religious polemics.
Language of Emphasis: Sanskrit
Michael Slouber is currently engaged in critically editing the Kriyakalagunottaratantra, a Saiva Bhautika/Garudika work extant in six Nepalese manuscripts. Slouber's Master's Thesis focuses on one section of the work, the Khadgaravanakalpa.  He is exploring the links between the Saiva figure Khadgaravana, and the Ravana of the Ramayana Epic. He is also interested in the polemics which developed between mainstream Hinduism and other native traditions.
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Yanrui Song
Indonesian

Aaron Sorenson
Southeast Asian Studies
Aaron studies language policy, linguistic history and Buddhism in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. He has additional interests in epigraphy and cognitive linguistics, particularly embodied conceptual metaphor and metonymy.

Daniel Stuart
Sanskrit

Christopher Tompkins
Sanskrit

Christopher Wallis
Sanskrit