SOAS, University of London

Dr Philippe Cullet is Professor of International and Environmental Law. He came to teach at SOAS with qualifications in law and development studies from Geneva University, London (King's College and SOAS) and Stanford University. His main areas of interest are environmental and natural resources law, policy and governance. He focuses in particular on water and sanitation; environmental human rights; rights of nature; the climate crisis; equity and inequality in environmental law; biodiversity; environmental/climate/water justice; and sustainable development. He works on these at the international level and in India.

University of Zurich

Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya is trained in India and the United States; she holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich and directs the Digital History Lab. She specializes in the history of the Anthropocene, climate, environment and the British Empire. Her approach to the Anthropocene is grounded in histories of empire and colonialism. Instead of taking the historicized environment for granted, she investigates the political economic and financial infrastructure that undergird the Anthropocene concept, climate science and environmental justice. How law and finance shape environmental concerns and climate futures has been an abiding interest in her work. She is a member of the Capitalism Studies Network at Australia National University and is a steering Committee Member of UZH Competence Center for Sustainable Finance.

Jadavpur University

Dr. Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, and was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at the University of Oxford, where she received her graduate and doctoral degrees. She has written and published in the fields of Renaissance studies, critical theory, Indian cultural history, urban studies, travel writing, sport, film, modernism and Indian higher education. Recent publications include the edited books Religion and the City in India (Routledge, 2022) and Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (Routledge, 2018), as well as articles in Spenser Studies, Études Épistémè, Thesis 11, Postcolonial Studies, and Religion and Urbanity online. Among other publications are chapters in The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (OPB, 2022), Machiavelli Then and Now: History, Politics, Literature (CUP, 2022), Recycling Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Art and Literature (Routledge, 2022), Asian Interventions in Global Shakespeare (Routledge, 2021), The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore (CUP, 2020) and The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (CUP, 2019); and forthcoming in the Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2023), and Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literature (OUP, 2023). She is active in debates on the humanities, urbanism, gender and higher education in India.

Kyoto University

Dr. Rohan D’Souza is currently Professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (Kyoto University). His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Agrarian Studies Program (Yale University) and at the University of California (Berkeley), besides having had visiting fellowships at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India (University of Pennsylvania) and at the Resources Management Asia-Pacific (Australian National University). He holds an honorary affiliation as Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History (University of Sussex) and was the Short-Term Chair at the University of Tokyo (Japan) as Visiting Professor of Contemporary Indian Studies. He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006). Besides having edited several collections on the broad theme of environmental history, his other publications in journals and book chapters include concerns for technology, sustainable development, and environmental politics. He also writes for the popular press in India and for several online journals on topics such as higher education, digital technology, and transboundary rivers.

Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi

Dr. Nishat Zaidi is Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She has conducted collaborative research with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand, SA, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany, and Michigan State University, USA. Her publications include her monographs, Makers of Indian Literature: Agha Shahid Ali (Sahitya Akademi 2014), Terrains of Consciousness: Multilogical Perspectives on Globalization (Wurzburg University Press, 2021, co-authored with Zeno Ackermann et al.), her translations and edited books, Day and Dastan (2018, with Alok Bhalla); Between Worlds: The Travels of Yusuf Khan Kambalposh (OUP 2014, with Mushirul Hasan) among others. Her forthcoming works are Karbala: A Historical Play (translation of Premchand’s Play Karbala with a critical introduction and notes, OUP, 2022) and her monograph Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (with Dilip Menon et al Routledge, 2022).

University of Pretoria

Dr. Charne Lavery is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is co-founder, with Isabel Hofmeyr, of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South research project and platform (www.oceanichumanities.com), and principal investigator on the South African National Research Foundation project ‘Antarctic Artists and Writers Programme (AWP) Pilot’. She is the author of Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English (Palgrave 2021) and three further co-edited books: Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Palgrave 2023), Reading from the South: African Print Cultures and Oceanic Turns in Isabel Hofmeyr’s Work (Wits University Press 2023), and Reading for Water: Materiality and Method (Routledge 2024).

University of Aberdeen

Dr. Shaktiman Singh is a Lecturer in Geography and Environment at the University of Aberdeen, where he also serves as Programme Director for the MSc in Geographical Information Systems. His research examines the impacts of climate change on mountain environments, with particular emphasis on glaciers, snow, permafrost, water resources and climate-related hazards. Combining field observations, satellite remote sensing and geospatial modelling, he investigates how changes in the Himalayan cryosphere influence river systems, water security and local communities. He has worked in the Baspa Basin of Himachal Pradesh since 2013, developing long-standing collaborations with local communities and undertaking research on glacier change, meltwater dynamics and environmental risks.

University of Aberdeen

Dr. Santosh Gaihre is a trained global public health and nutrition academic researcher with around 15 years of experience in environmental, lifestyle and social aspects of health and health promotion research. He has conducted population health research in both high- and low-income settings, including the UK, Colombia, Mexico, and Nepal. He has experience in both quantitative and qualitative research methods and his research skills include transdisciplinary research, systematic reviews, meta-analysis, quantitative surveys, interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation.

Krea University

Dr. Panchali Ray is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Krea University. She completed her BA in History from Calcutta University (Kolkata), MA in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Science (Mumbai) and a PhD in Gender Studies from Jadavpur University (Kolkata), India. Before joining Krea, she was part of the faculty at the School of Women’s Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Ray’s current areas of interest include rivers, borders, migration, citizenship and care regimes in Bengal.