9/1/09: One of the country’s premier scholars of South Asian politics and ethnic conflict, Ashutosh Varshney, has joined the Brown faculty as a professor of political science this year.
For a decade and a half, Varshney has studied peace and conflict in India and other developing countries. While his early work examined questions of political economy, in the early 1990s, Varshney felt a strong “intellectual desire” to “plunge into a field where the view of human life was fuller and not confined to economic rationality.” He soon began focusing on ethnocommunal conflict in India and the role of emotions, religious beliefs, and commitments to larger causes in political life.