TEACHING AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
I have accepted the overture to become the Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Global Affairs at the invitation of my good friend, Prof. Jamshed Bharucha, a Trebuchet mentor and Vice Chancellor of Sai University. I have been tasked with helping Jamshed to create the Social Science curriculum offerings at Sai University, to act as a Sai “ambassador,” and special advisor for campus intellectual life. I reported to Jamshed for over a decade as the Founding Director of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts. I was joined in this venture by Cody Valdez, my former student, and friend now for well over a decade. It is particularly exciting to have introduced Cody to Sai University where he became their Senior Lecturer and Senior Tutor residing in Chennai.
We are creating immersive educational opportunities, internships, and research experiences, many provided by my Trebuchet mentors and our colloquia lecturers. My appointment is for four years and will enable me to witness the evolution of this progressive and distinctive international interdisciplinary university. While primarily virtual for me, I will be on-site in Chennai as well.
Cody designed and is teaching courses entitled “Liberty, Power, Right”, “Mind, Body, and Self”, and along with wonderful Jyotsna Badrinarayanan (Teaching Fellow at SaiU) designed and teaching a course entitled “Introduction to International Relations”.
Together, Cody and I created the Global Challenges and Frontiers of Knowledge Colloquia, a two-semester interdisciplinary social sciences curricula. Our students, the first entering class of Sai University, are an eclectic mix of Arts & Sciences students and Computing & Data Science majors. Shaheer Rahman and Ravi Patel, two Trebuchet interns, were involved in the 2021 effort as teaching assistants. Shaheer is with us again for 2022. Tarun Kumar Reddy, my student from the first batch, joined us initially as a graphic designer and evolved into a coordinator and an ombudsman for me.
The Global Challenges Colloquium continued at Sai University in 2022, 2023, and 2024 with entirely different presentations. The presentation posters and syllabi are listed in descending order on the Sai University Page.
Along with Jyotsna Badrinarayanan, I created courses called Confronting and Resolving Global Security Challenges, a seminar on Power and Memory, and a senior honours research practicum.
To honour Jamshed and to build a library for SaiU, in particular, my courses, I sent over 1000 volumes as a first instalment to SaiU library to pursue their work. I was able to gift my seminar Confronting and Resolving Global Security Challenges, a volume of VII Photo Foundation, thanks to the co-founders of VII Photo Agency, Ron Haviv and Gary Knight
To know more about the courses, click the button below.