Mukulika Banerjee, Director
M.Banerjee@lse.ac.uk
Mukulika’s current research interests are on the cultural meanings of democracy. Her most recent publication is Why India Votes? (2014) in which she explores the reasons behind India's rising trends of voter participation. She is currently completing a manuscript based on 15 years of engagement with a village in India to explain the sources of democratic thinking in Indian social life. Dr Banerjee was awarded her PhD from the University of Oxford in 1994 based on field research in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa (North West Frontier Province). It was published as her first book, The Pathan Unarmed (2001; she has co-authored The Sari (2003), a book on the modernity of fashion, and edited Muslim Portraits (2007), a collection of 12 Muslim life-stories in South Asia. Read more about her research and interests here.
Nilanjan Sarkar, Deputy Director and Development Manager
N.Sarkar@lse.ac.uk
Nilanjan brings to the role professional experience in 3 related areas in higher education: research and teaching, academic publishing, and administration.
Nilanjan was awarded his PhD in 2005 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on a Persian Advice text written in 14th century Delhi, now surviving as a single manuscript in the collections of the British Library. His specialism is in the medieval Islamic history of the Indian subcontinent, with a particular focus on the pre-Mughal period (AD 1000-1400) in which he holds a Masters and an MPhil as well.
His research interests and publications are in scribal cultures and making of historical archives in early medieval India, techniques of history-writing in Indo-Persian traditions, the creation of historical knowledge in Islamic pre-Mughal India, and investigating categories of identity – of individuals, groups and institutions. A wider spread of these interests includes concerns with the use of history in contemporary India’s construction of identity, selfhood and nationhood; and he has recently been associated with a project on the history of friendship in pre-colonial India. In 2009, he was Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, where he worked on the role of imagination in urban descriptions of the Delhi Sultanate. He is currently co-editing a volume of essays on medieval peninsular India, and reworking his doctoral dissertation for publication. He has taught in several colleges in Delhi, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
In his administrative roles, Nilanjan has handled student recruitment, widening participation, outreach programmes and associated tasks in UK Higher Education. Between 2000-2005 he worked in various such roles at SOAS, and has attended HE recruitment fairs in the UK, as well as in the US, Canada and India, organised summer schools and open days, and was responsible for preparing undergraduate and postgraduate prospectuses, and handbooks for international students. He has also worked to raise funds and build networks with donors and alumni, and is a member of the Council and the Fellowship & Development Committee of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland. Most recently, Nilanjan was Administrator at the King’s India Institute, King’s College London.
He is a trained copyeditor, and was Publishing Manager at Routledge Books in New Delhi till November 2011, where his principal task was to help create an academic titles list to establish the brand as a commercially viable enterprise in India; earlier, in the mid-1990s, he worked in SAGE Publications in New Delhi, where he was Editor of academic books and journals; and he has been associated with various aspects of commercial academic book publishing in India in freelance roles. In London, he worked as Web & Publications Editor at SOAS, where he was responsible for preparing online materials for student recruitment, course content, publicity and marketing, and was responsible for web-content administration.
He likes to read, travel, and think.
Tim Aldcroft, Administrator
T.E.Aldcroft@lse.ac.uk
Tim’s roles within the voluntary and education sector over the past 15 years have had a strong focus on equalities. For the five years prior to joining the South Asia Centre, Tim had been working as the Volunteer and Program Manager at CENTRED, an LGBTQ community development charity based in Soho, London. He was involved in establishing a volunteer programme and planning diverse LGBTQ community activities and events as well as funding development work and outreach. CENTRED’s intersectional approach to community engagement and broader equalities thinking has played a key role in Tim’s professional development. Alongside its community events programme, it also produced significant research around the experiences of diverse LGBTQ organising in London and held regular learning network events for London’s community of organisers and activists, approaching community development from multiple perspectives — from all of which Tim has gained valuable experience, not least in time–work management.
He has a background in the visual arts, with a BA in Photographic Arts from the University of Westminster (1999–2002). He then trained as a youth worker, and as part of his development was funded to study an MA in Applied Anthropology and Community and Youth Work at Goldsmiths, University of London (2007–2008). He has travelled to Cuba, Japan, Eastern Europe, and India. His trip to India, especially West Bengal, sparked an interest in learning Bengali. Tim has studied up to Level 3 British Sign Language, and knows conversational Spanish from his time spent in Cuba.
Tim brings to the Centre his experience of working with youth and young people from diverse backgrounds, and his ability to engage with everyone — germinal assets in his position as Administrator. Tim is an integral part of the Centre’s team, and plays a key role in the everyday work of the Centre. Please write to him for all queries regarding the South Asia Centre.
Sonali Campion, Communications and Events Officer
southasia@lse.ac.uk
As Communications and Events Officer, Sonali manages the South Asia Centre’s social media, monthly e-newsletter and other event communications. She is also Editor of South Asia @ LSE, the Centre's flagship blog which features articles by academics and experts working on the region. In the last year, the blog has published articles, interviews, book reviews, and other pieces that provide in-depth and comparative analysis of issues of concern in South Asia. The Centre's Twitter (@SAsiaLSE) and Facebook accounts are managed by Sonali, and feature regular updates of the Centre's activities.
Sonali completed her Bachelor in Arts degree in History at the University of Oxford in 2011, and graduated from LSE with an MSc in Comparative Politics in 2015 with a distinction. She has a keen academic interest in democracy and election administration as political processes, especially in South Asia. This interest is reflected in both her undergraduate dissertation on the introduction of universal franchise in the first post-colonial Indian elections, and her Masters dissertation on the role of electoral commissions in democratisation processes. She has also sought to expand her knowledge in more practical ways: she works regularly as a polling clerk for UK elections, and volunteered as an election observer for the Referendum on Scottish independence, and the parliamentary elections in Ukraine.
Sonali has held research and editorial positions in the LSE Public Policy Group, and the Constitution Unit at University College London. Before joining LSE she also worked in communications roles at several NGOs including Oxfam and the Electoral Reform Society.
Huma Yusuf, Advisor-Pakistan
H.Yusuf@lse.ac.uk
Huma is a political risk consultant focusing on Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington DC. She was the Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2010–11, and from 2012–14, Huma worked at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she launched and edited the India@LSE (now South Asia @ LSE) blog, and supported the launch of the South Asia Centre.
Huma has previously been an award-winning journalist based in Karachi, and continues to write about politics, security and human rights in South Asia for the international media, including Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, New York Times International, and the South Asia Channel of Foreign Policy. She has been awarded the All-Pakistan Newspapers Society ‘Best Column’ Award (2008, 2010), the European Commission’s Prix Natali Lorenzo Award for Human Rights and Democracy Journalism (2006), and the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation ‘Gender in Journalism’ Award (2005).
She lives in London and, alongside her consultancy, is completing a book manuscript on the impact of Pakistan’s independent media on politics, extremism and foreign policy.