Leadership - India China Institute

Mark Frazier

Co-Director,
India China Institute
Professor of Politics
The New School for Social Research

Mark Frazier

Mark W. Frazier’s research interests focus on labor and social policy in China, and more recently on the political conflict over urbanization, migration, and citizenship in China and India. His newest book, The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Bombay (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines long-term changes in political geographies and patterns of popular protest in the two cities. He is also the author of Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press, 2010), The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Co-Editor of the SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China (SAGE Publications, 2018). He has authored op-ed pieces and essays for The New York Times, Daedalus, and The Diplomat. Dr. Frazier serves on the editorial board of China Quarterly and is a Faculty Associate at the Columbia University’s China Center for Social Policy. He received a Fulbright Research Award in 2004-05 and has been a Public Intellectuals Program fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations since 2005. Before assuming his current position at The New School in 2012, he held a chaired professorship in Chinese Politics at the University of Oklahoma and was the Luce Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of East Asia at Lawrence University, a liberal arts college in Wisconsin.

For more info: https://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty/mark-w-frazier/

Manjari Mahajan

Co-Director,
India China Institute
Associate Professor, Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs
Schools of Public Engagement

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Manjari Mahajan

Manjari Mahajan’s work lies at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Development Studies, and Anthropology. Her research and teaching are on the topics of global health, philanthrocapitalism, and digital governance. Much of her empirical focus has been on India and South Africa, and more recently, on global organizations such as the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization. She has held fellowships at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany, and the Social Science Research Council in the United States. Her papers have received prizes from the Society for Social Studies for Science and the American Anthropological Association. She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University, her MSc in Science and Technology Policy from SPRU Sussex University, and her BA from Harvard University.

For more info: https://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/faculty/manjari-mahajan/

Grace Hou

Deputy Director,
India China Institute

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Grace Hou

Grace Hou oversees the operation and administration of India China Institute, including the management of the institute’s annual budget, personnel hiring and contracting, and public programming. Grace Hou possesses over 15 years of experience in higher education, as a faculty and an administrator. She is a founding member of the India China Institute, and serves as a core resource and relationship builder/keeper internally with other constituencies of The New School, and externally with the Institute’s numerous partners, funders, scholars, leaders, consultants, and vendors.

Grace had extensive graduate education in both China and the U.S. She also received legal training at New York University. Prior to the India China Institute, Grace practiced as a Senior Paralegal at the Vice President and General Counsel’s Office of The New School. She is knowledgeable in immigration, contracts and labor law. Grace is ex-officio of the Faculty Advisory Committee and Executive Committee at ICI; on the ICI Starr Foundation Fellowships and Postdoctoral Fellowship Selection Committee; The New School’s Joint Committee on Global Education and the Committee on Study Abroad Programs.

Faculty Advisory Committee

Ying CHEN

Assistant Professor, Economics

The New School of Social Research

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Ying Chen

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work mainly explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on.

Emma Park

Assistant Professor, History

Eugene Lang College of Liberal Studies

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Emma Park

Emma Park is also Co-Director of Capitalism Studies at The New School, where she teach courses on modern Africa, science and technology, global histories of capitalism, and the history of “development.” Her current research uses infrastructure development projects to explore transformations in capitalism and state-craft, and she mobilizes an ethnographically-informed reading of the cultural politics of infrastructures and work from the twentieth-century through to the present. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book manuscript tentatively entitled: Infrastructural Attachments: Technologies, Mobility, and the Tensions of Home in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya. Through an exploration of three infrastructures ‘in the making’ —roads, radio, and Kenya’s now-famed telephonic banking service, M-PESA—she argues that infrastructures in Kenya have been deeply charged cultural, political, and economic objects. She has a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Miodrag Mitrasinovic

Professor, Architecture and Urbanism

Parsons School of Design

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Miodrag Mitrasinovic

Miodrag Mitrašinović is an architect, urbanist, author, and Professor of Urbanism and Architecture at Parsons School of Design, The New School, in New York City. He is the editor of Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion (Routledge 2015), co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (with Jilly Traganou, Ashgate/Routledge 2009), and author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Ashgate/Routledge 2006). Professor Mitrašinović’s scholarly work focuses on two parallel and complementary lines of inquiry. First, on the role design plays as an agent of social and political change, and as catalyst for critical urban transformations; his research argues for the centrality of designing in the conceptualization, production, and representation of democratic and participatory urban space. Secondly, his work also focuses on the generative capacity and infrastructural dimensions of public space specifically at the intersections of public policy, urban and public design, and processes of privatization of public resources. His first two books received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in 2004 and 2006 respectively. He has served in a variety of scholarly, professional and editorial roles. His professional and scholarly work has been published internationally.

Professor Mitrašinović holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Florida at Gainesville (1998), U.S.A.; MArch from The Berlage Institute, the Netherlands (1994); and Dipl. Ing. Arch. Diploma from the University of Belgrade, Serbia (1992). Before joining The New School in 2005, he held teaching and research appointments at the University of Texas at Austin (1998-2005, with tenure), at the University of Florida at Gainesville (1995-96 and 1997-98), and at Kyoto University in Japan (1996-97). In 2012, he completed the academic leadership program at Harvard University, the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education (MLE).

Mitrašinović regularly lectures on his scholarly work as well as on his work as design educator and academic leader; he also often takes part in academic and professional panels, conferences and studio reviews.

Latha Poonamallee

Associate Professor, Management and Social Innovation

Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment

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Latha Poonamallee

Latha Poonamallee is a tenured Associate Professor of Management & Social Innovation and Chair of Management at the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment, and University Faculty Fellow at The New School. She received her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio and has presented and published her award-winning research on change management, leadership, and social innovation/entrepreneurship in numerous international conferences and journals.

She is currently working on two key projects.

“Harnessing Technology Innovation for Social Impact,” a book currently contract with Palgrave Macmillan and slated to be published in 2020.
Research on how mindfulness and other contemplative approaches can be utilized to develop prosocial mental models and behaviors and leadership skills to advance a more just, prosperous, and sustainable world.

In May 2019, she was appointed as Editor in Chief of the Society of Advancement of Management Journal, a preeminent journal that has been published for over 75 years. She also received a Fulbright Scholarship to assist the Botswana government, USAID, and Botswana Civil Society in developing a nation-wide social entrepreneurship ecosystem.

She is also the co-founder and Chairperson of In-Med Prognostics, a health tech firm that uses AI and imaging technologies to develop brain health predictive analytics. This firm has received accolades such as the Falling Walls Conference (Germany), BIRAC grant (Government of India grant), and presented scientific papers in the European Radiology Society Conference in Vienna.

Nidhi Srinivas

Associate Professor, Management

Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment

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Nidhi Srinivas

Nidhi Srinivas is Associate Professor of Management at Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment. His research centers on social innovation and postcolonial studies, mobilizing critical theory to study a variety of topics, including management history, international development, mutual aid, ecological politics and civic design. He publishes widely and has received several fellowships, including from Erasmus Mundus, the India China Institute, and the BRICS policy center. He has also served as visiting professor at different institutions, including the ITC-ILO, Turin; Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo; Sao Paulo School of Business Administration; and the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

Srinivas teaches courses in Management and Social Innovation. His classes enhance students’ ability to critique and integrate theories, with a particular focus on design, inclusion and social justice.

His book Against Non-Governmental Organizations? Tracking commonsense in Civil Society, Management and Development. is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

External Advisory Board

Arjun Appadurai, Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

Amita Bhide, Professor, Dean of School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Science

Prasenjit Duara, Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies, Duke University

Peter Joachim Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University

Nimmi Kurian, Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India

LIU, Jian , Professor, Director of the Cultural Research Office, Executive Deputy Editor-in-Chief of “South Asian Studies”, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Professor of Political Science and Former Vice-Chancellor, Ashoka University

Partha Mukhopadhyay, Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India

Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University

Aromar Revi, Founding Director, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS)

Tansen Sen, Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai

Kellee S. Tsai, Dean and Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

YAO, Yang, Dean and Professor, National School of Development (NSD), Peking University

Min YE, Associate Professor of International Relations, Boston University

YANG, Zuojun, Chief Executive Officer, Bluetown Real Estate and Construction Management Group (Ltd.), Zhejiang, China

YANG Zuojun

Director General, Hangzhou Urban Planning Bureau, China

YANG Zuojun has been responsible for the recent development of historic Hangzhou, China into a city poised for participation in the global arena. An architect and urban planner by training, he aided in the contemporary urban planning of Beijing before working in Hangzhou. Yang is deeply interested in the future of urban development in China and how it dovetails with similar development efforts in cities in India and the United States. He was previously Director of the Hangzhou Commission of Urban and Rural Construction, subsequently Director of the Hangzhou Department of Science and Technology. He is currently a CEO of the Bluetown Real Estate and Construction Management Group in Zhejiang, China.

LIU, Jian

Liu Jian, born in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province in 1949, is a retired full professor at the National Institute of International Strategy, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Adjudicator of the Chinese National Social Science Funds. Graduated from the English Section, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Shanxi University at Taiyuan in 1977. M. A. in the area of Indian literature at Peking University in 1981. Ford Foundation fellow with the Department of South Asian Studies, the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1988 to 1991. His special fields of expertise are Indian and South Asian Studies. His main publications include Yindu Wenming (Indian Civilization, co-authored, 2004, 2008, 2017; Mengjialaguo (Bangladesh, 2010; 2021); Lun Jitanjiali (On Gitanjali: Writings on Indian Culture and Literature, 2016). He has also published a number of research papers in both Chinese and English in the fields of Indian and South Asian studies. Executive deputy editor-in-chief of the journal of South Asian Studies (in Chinese; 1996-2009). He served recently as a vice editor-in-chief of and main contributor to the Encyclopedia of China-India Cultural Contacts (2016). He gave 30 series of lectures on Indian history on Himalaya FM in 2019. He is also the translator of a number of books such as The Religion of Man, The Argumentative Indian, Muna-Madan, Chemmeen, Samskara, etc. A key translator and reviser of the international Chinese edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1999).