Founded in 2005, the India China Institute is located within The New School, in New York City. Our goal is to enhance academic and public understanding of the global significance of India and China, which we pursue through support of interdisciplinary research and scholarship, fellowships, publications, workshops, and courses. The India China Institute also organizes public lectures and conferences featuring the participation of a global network of scholars, entrepreneurs, artists and diplomats.

“At the India China Institute, we are bringing together key people to rethink vital questions like: What are the truly important issues? How is the world changing? If we can get thinkers in India, China and the United States not only to agree about the biggest questions, but also to decide the shape and scope of them, then the answers will have a certain range of durability that answers in the past have not had. That’s a big ambition. But The New School has always been about big ambitions.” – Arjun Appadurai, ICI Co-founder.

It is important to understand the historical context behind the creation of ICI to explain how a university with no real area expertise in Asia came to be the home for an innovative research institute focused on India and China. The New School, founded in 1919, was informed by John Dewey’s ideas of pragmatism and progressive education, later drawing influences from the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School as scholars exiled from Germany in the 1930s joined the faculty. Later influences came from the incorporation of the Parsons School of Design in 1970. The establishment of the India China Institute in 2005 at a university with a heavily Euro-American focus in terms of faculty and curriculum arose from a unique set of events. Then-President of The New School Bob Kerrey hired Anthropology Professor Arjun Appadurai as Provost of The New School in 2004, and asked him to turn his mind to creating a new institute within the school that continued and advanced its reputation for unconventional approaches to research and teaching. Appadurai, together with Professor Ben Lee, who at that time was the Dean of The New School for Social Research, conceived of ICI as a place to pursue new ways of thinking about the re-emergence of India and China onto the world stage in a manner that went beyond a traditional area studies approach.

In 1997, Appadurai with a group of scholars, prepared a White Paper for the Ford Foundation entitled “Area Studies, Regional Worlds.” They argued for the need to move beyond “trait-based geographies” to “process-based geographies” in light of the fact that existing approaches, focused on bounded civilizations, cultures, and areas, “frequently draw the wrong boundaries, ignore important interactions and are driven by obsolete assumptions about national interest, cultural coherence and global processes.” The large regions that dominated existing area studies thinking were seen as problematic for the contemporary study of global geographic and cultural processes. This intellectual commitment to finding new ways to think about how different regions of a globalized world interact has shaped the ICI’s work. ICI continues to be an innovative institute with an India-China-US trilateral focus that brings together current and future leaders from the three countries to address issues of global concern.

ICI was started with a generous $10 million endowment from the Starr Foundation. In line with the Institute’s initial vision, the endowment was split between two endowed professorships, an “Asian Leaders” fellowship program (the ICI Fellows), and a publications and research component.

Ashok Gurung, who joined The New School as a Professor of Practice in the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy, was asked to take on the role of first Senior Director. In 2012 ICI hired Mark Frazier and Sanjay Reddy as Co-Academic Directors, which provided an opportunity to focus on expanding the research agenda within The New School. In 2019 Manjari Mahajan joined as ICI Academic Co-Director.

ICI receives support from the original Starr Foundation endowment, as well as project-specific grants received since 2005 from the Ford Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation.

Past Leaders

Arjun Appadurai

Founding Director

Ashok Gurung

Senior Director

Benjamin Lee

Founding Director

Sanjay Reddy

Co-Academic Director

Past Members & Ex-Officio Members of the Faculty Advisory Committee

Jonathan Bach

Professor, Global Studies

The New School for Social Research

Faisal Devji

Asst. Professor, University of Liberal Studies

Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

Ashok Gurung

Senior Director 

India China Institute

Eiko Ikegame

Professor, Sociology and Historical Studies

The New School for Social Research

Aseem Inam

Associate Professor, Urbanism,

School of Design Strategies, Parsons School of Design

Lily Ling

Associate Professor, International Affairs 

Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy

Tim Marshall

Dean

Parsons School of Design

Victoria Marshall

Assistant Professor, Urban Design

School of Design Strategies, Parsons School of Design

Brian McGrath

Professor, Urban Design

Parsons School of Design

Shagun Mehrotra

Assistant Professor, Sustainable Development

Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy

Lei Ping

Assistant Professor,

China Studies

Schools of Public Engagement

Sanjay Ruparelia

Associate Professor, Politics

The New School for Social Research

Bryna Sanger

Deputy Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

The New School

Anwar Shaikh

Professor, Economics

The New School for Social Research

Joel Towers

Associate Provost for Environmental Studies

Director, Tishman Environmental and Design Center

I-Hsien Wu

Assistant Professor, Chinese language and literature 

The New School

About The New School

Since its founding in 1919, The New School has redrawn and redefined the boundaries of intellectual and creative thought as a preeminent academic center. The rigorous, multidimensional approach to education dissolves walls between disciplines and helps nurture progressive minds, and students have the academic freedom to shape their unique, individual paths for a complex and rapidly changing world.