Ashutosh Varshney

Ashutosh Varshney joined the political science faculty at Brown University in January 2009. Previously, he taught at Harvard (1989-98) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2001-2008). He is a Carnegie Scholar award-winner.

His Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (Yale, 2002) won the Gregory Luebbert Prize of the American Political Science Association. Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India (Cambridge 1995), in its Ph.D. dissertation form, won the Daniel Lerner Prize at MIT.

His research and teaching cover three areas: Ethnicity and Nationalism; Political Economy of Development; and South Asian Politics and Political Economy. His academic papers have appeared in World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Daedalus, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Democracy, Journal of East Asian Studies, and Foreign Affairs. In addition to professional journals, he also contributes guest columns to newspapers and magazines.

With support from his Guggenheim Fellowship he is currently working on a multicountry project on cities and ethnic conflict, and on the rising North-South economic divergence in India.

He served on the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Millennium Task Force on Poverty (2002-5). He has also served as an adviser to the World Bank, UNDP, and the Club of Madrid.