Speaker: Arvind Rajagopal, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University

Arvind Rajagopal's scholarly work is at the intersection of sociology, cultural history and media theory, and explores the history of publicity and political aesthetics as seen from the global south. His archives are in or from South Asia, the United Kingdom and the United States. His book Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2003, and his edited volume The Indian Public Sphere appeared in 2009. Recent articles include "The Emergency and the New Indian Middle Class" in Modern Asian Studies, 2011, and "Special Political Zone" on the anti-Muslim violence in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in South Asian History and Culture, 2011, and a paper on the history of advertising in India, "State Ventriloquism (under review). His latest book, under contract with Duke University Press, is on the political culture of post-independence India. He has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. As well, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Goettingen, Germany, the Delhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi, and the Central University of Hyderabad. He is a Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, at New York University.