SASA Board

The SASA Board of Directors is made up of individuals sharing a common vision for the Association and a significant commitment to its realization. The Board will grow over time as additional individuals come forward who share the vision with enthusiasm and dedication.

Current Directors:
William Vanderbok, president
Chandrika Kaul, vice-president
Deepak Shimkhada, treasurer
Joe Pellegrino, secretary
Vandana Asthana
Gunjan Bagla
Dina Bangdel
David Blundell
Muthusami Kumaran
Carlos Lopez
Ken Silverman

Emeritus Members
SASA recognizes its founding and former members of the board with Emeritus status. The following have given years of valiant service to SASA and the South Asian academic community.

Paul Hanson
Ramdas Lamb
Dean McHenry
Ram M. Roy



Vandana Asthana (PhD Political Science, CSJM University India, PhD Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) was the Head of the Department of Political Science at Christ Church College, C.S.J.M University in Kanpur, India and currently teaches political science in the Department of Government at Eastern Washington University. In October 2010 she received the Outstanding Faculty Award for Scholarship/Creative Activity at Eastern Washington. Her publications include several books: Water Policy Processes in India: Discourses of Power and Resistance, The Politics of Environment, India's Foreign Policy and Subcontinental Politics, Theory of International Politics and two edited volumes, Security in South Asia: Trends and Directions and Advances in Environmental Biopollution. She has published a large number of research articles in various journals and has contributed chapters in edited volumes. She has been on delegations of Track Two Diplomacy for confidence building measures between India and Pakistan. Dr. Asthana has been associated with premier think tanks in the region and has participated in the Ford Foundation projects in India and Sri Lanka on Comprehensive and Environmental Security in South Asia. She is the Founder member of the IC Centre for Governance, New Delhi, and the Founder Secretary and Member Advisory Panel of Eco-Friends, an NGO that works on water issues in India. She has served as consultant and completed a project for the Government of India on the Water Security of India. Her forthcoming books include Nuke Waters: Water Security in India and Pakistan.

Gunjan Bagla (MBA , Southern Illinois; BSME, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur) is Managing Director of Amritt, Inc., a management consultancy that helps Western executives at top companies to do business in India. He also created the executive workshop Doing Business in India for Caltech’s executive education program and taught it several times a year until 2009. Bagla is the author of Doing Business in 21st Century India (Hachette 2008) and blogs at www.theindiaexpert.com. His web-based "Dictionary of Indian English" is a popular location to find both current and classic words used by Indians as part of an English conversation. Bagla writes about India for Business Week and other publications. He is a frequent public speaker on India and business. He is currently the President of the Alumni Association of the IITs and a Charter Member of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneur. He lives in Cerritos, California with his wife Smita, and two school-age children.

Dina Bangdel (PhD, The Ohio State University) is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Art History Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her primary areas of specialization are South Asian/Indian art and Himalayan art, with secondary areas of interests relating to the issues of gender and identity in South Asian contemporary art and film. Her current research focuses on the art and ritual traditions of Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal and the development of Tantric Buddhist iconography of the Himalayan regions, principally Nepal and Tibet.

David Blundell (PhD, University of California) is based at National Chengchi University in Taipei, and has contributed a number of works on South Asia including Masks: Anthropology on the Sinhalese Belief System (NY: Peter Lang) and the making of a feature documentary film Dr B. R. Ambedkar and the Birth of a New Era in India (Navaloka Productions). He is an international consultant for the Institute for the Development of Community Strength (INDECOS), an NGO in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka for assisting rural arts and cultural development and programs. His current research collaboration is with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative for language and culture mapping. Professor Blundell offers courses such as South Asia as a Cultural Area; Buddhism as Myth, Liberator, and Power in Southern Asia; and Introduction to Development Studies: Economic Development and Culture Change - at universities in Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, and the United States.

Paul Hanson (PhD, University of Chicago) is Chair of the Department of History at California Lutheran University. He previously taught at St. Olaf College and Agra University (India). Twice a Fulbright Scholar in India, Dr. Hanson's research has focused on Islamic history in South Asia, especially the relationship of religion and political legitimacy. Other national fellowships and awards have enabled him to study in London, Sri Lanka and Jordan. He is the winner of the President's Award for Teaching Excellence.

Chandrika Kaul (PhD, Oxford University) serves as SASA vice president. Dr. Kaul is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the co-editor of a new book series from Palgrave Macmillan titled, Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. She is the author of An Indian History of the Raj as well as Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, 1880-1922, the first detailed examination of British press coverage of the sub-continent. She has also edited Media and the British Empire. In addition, she has contributed articles to a number of international academic journals, including Twentieth Century British History, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Media History and Contemporary India. Her contributions have also appeared in New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford); The Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia as well as in book chapters in Northcliff’s Legacy: Aspects of the Popular Press 1896-1996; A Journalism Reader; The "Round Table": The Empire-Commonwealth and British Foreign Policy; Contemporary History Handbook; The Communications Revolution; Gender and Media; Empire, Competition and War: Essays on the Press in the Twentieth Century, etc. She has taught for various US educational institutions’ study abroad programmes at Oxford University, including the Smithsonian Institution, Princeton, New York University, Duke/UNC, etc.

Muthusami Kumaran (PhD, University of Louisville) is an Assistant Professor of Nonprofit Management & Community Organizations in the Family, Youth, and Community Sciences department at the University of Florida. His areas of research interest include various aspects of nonprofit management, roles of NGOs, community development, civic engagement, home- and community-based elderly care services, and environmental justice. Prior to his academic career, Dr. Kumaran worked for a nonprofit organization and a state government agency. He has also served on the boards of various small, medium and large nonprofit organizations. He currently serves on the board of Florida 4-H Foundation. He has published articles, book chapters and presented numerous research papers related to the nonprofit sector and NGOs.

Ramdas Lamb (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Dr. Lamb's current research is on monastic traditions and religion among the low castes in central and northern India. He was a Hindu sadhu (monk) in north India from 1969 until 1978.

Carlos Lopez (PhD, Harvard University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida. His areas of research include Vedic Studies, Sanskrit Language and Literature, South Asian Religions, Classical Hinduism, Ritual Studies, and Epic Studies. His most recent work is Atharvaveda-Paippalada, Kandas 13-14. Text, translation, commentary. Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora, vol. 6. Cambridge, MA: Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, 2010.

Dean McHenry (PhD, Indiana University) is currently a professor of politics and policy at the Claremont Graduate University. He has also taught at the University of Calabar (Nigeria), Brown University, University of Illinois, and the University of Dar es Salam (Tanzania). He served as Dean of the School of Politics and Economics at CGU. In addition to field research in Africa, he has conducted extensive work in India (Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal). He is the author to two books on African politics, Limited Choices: The Political Struggle for Socialism in Tanzania, and Tanzania’s Ujamaa Villages: the Implementation of a Rural Development Strategy. He has contributed chapters to a number of books on African politics, one on India, and published nearly two dozen professional papers. He was a Fulbright Senior Specialist had received research awards/fellowships from the Haynes Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright-Hayes, N.D.F.L., Fletcher Jones, and Midwest Consortium for International Development.

Joe Pellegrino (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) serves as the SASA secretary and the technology coordinator on the SASA board. He is also the managing editor for Exemplar. Dr. Pellegrino teaches postcolonial literature and Irish Studies at Georgia Southern University. He previously taught at Eastern Kentucky University and The University of South Carolina - Upstate. His most recent work, in the South Asian Review, is on Edward Elgar's Crown of India Masque. He has coordinated the annual British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference for several years, and is the web administrator for the The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

Ram M. Roy (PhD, Claremont Graduate University) is Professor Emeritus of political science at California State University, Northridge. Dr. Roy's areas of interest include: U.S. Foreign Policy; Comparative Foreign Policies; India U.S. and Asia relations. Dr. Roy's publications include: Indian Democracy in Crisis; India and The World in the Post Cold War Era. He has also written papers such as: "Non-alignment: the Cultural Background" and "The Sino-Soviet Disputes in Southeast Asia." He is a TV Commentator, and a Public Speaker.

Deepak Shimkhada (PhD, Claremont Graduate University), serves as SASA treasurer. Dr. Shimkhada taught in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of Claremont McKenna College from where he's retired and is now an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University. He has published three books, The Constant and Changing Faces of the Goddess: Goddess Traditions of Asia; Popular Buddhist Mantras in Sanskrit; and Himalayas at the Crossroads: Portraits of a Changing World. Two other books nearing publication are Nepal: Nostalgia and Modernity; Memories of a Painful Past: Chinese Posters of the Cultural Revolution. He has contributed chapters to The Constant and Changing Faces of the Goddess; Bhagavata Purana: A Reader; Health and Religious Rituals in South Asia: Diseases, Possession and Healing; and Sangama: A Confluence of Art and Culture During the Vijayanagara Period. Articles have appeared in NAFA Art Magazine, Arts of Asia, Orientations, Artibus Asiae, Oriental Art, Journal of Asian Studies, Himalayan Research Bulletin, Voice of Ulan Bator, Himalaya, Folk Dance Scene, The Overseas Times, India West, and The Rising Nepal. He is the president of Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast; founder and president of the Foundation for Indic Philosophy and Culture; founder and president of the Himalayan Arts Council at the Pacific Asia Museum; and editor of two newsletters: Himalaya and Indicator.

Ken Silverman is the president of Interactive Teamworks, a privately held consulting and creative services organization. Mr. Silverman is a nationally prominent media strategist and entrepreneur with more than 35 years of experience in the front ranks of the U.S. entertainment and communications fields. He has participated in the acquisition, production, distribution, and marketing of content for motion picture theaters, commercial and public broadcasting, cable and pay-television, home video, satellites, interactive media, and the Internet. Since 1997, Mr. Silverman has specialized in electronic media related to the Indian subcontinent. He is a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), former Executive Vice President of Indians in American Media [IAM], and writes often for The India Journal. He is Executive Producer of two forthcoming US motion pictures targeted to be shot in India, and sponsored The 2006 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. A critical member of the SASA board, he brings needed management and marketing expertise.

William Vanderbok (PhD, Indiana University), serves as SASA president. Dr. Vanderbok has held full-time academic appointments at the University of Colorado, Indiana University, Texas Tech University and the University of California, Los Angeles. He received multiple grants from the East-West Center (Honolulu) to do research on Indian politics. He has published in Modern Asian Studies, The British Journal of Political Science, Political Methodology, Contemporary South Asia, Asian Survey, The Canadian Journal of Political Science, Social Science History, Journal of Police Science and Administration, Polity, Western Political Science Quarterly, The Journal of Asian Studies and PC Magazine.