STUDENT & FACULTY NEWS

The Chowdhury Center provides several scholarships to Berkeley students for conducting research to improve the lives of those in Bangladesh.

Kirtana Dasa (Kirt) Mausert, a PhD Student, Department of Anthropology received the 2022 Malini Chowdhury Fellowship on Bangladesh Studies for his research titled, Citizenship and Belonging in Bamar Buddhist-dominated Burma/Myanmar. Kirt is an accomplished scholar-activist committed to addressing the plight of Rohingya in Myanmar and as refugees in Bangladesh. The fellowship will support him as he pursues his research on Bangladesh-centered scholarship on the politics of names and naming practices of Rohingya, and on the sociology of disaster and humanitarian management in Bangladesh and on its borders.
 
We are thrilled that our faculty community continues to grow. Please join us in welcoming our new Bangladesh-related faculty.

Zachary Lamb, Assistant Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, works on the role of urban planning and design in shaping uneven vulnerability and resilience in the face of climate change. In 2018, Professor Lamb completed his PhD at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His dissertation focused on the role of design in shaping urban flood infrastructure and the changing spatial politics of urban flooding through two case study cities, New Orleans, Louisiana and Dhaka, Bangladesh. His current book project, Making and Unmaking the Dry City, focuses on the historical evolution and contemporary problems of flood mitigation in these two cities. After completing his PhD, Professor Lamb was selected to be a Princeton Mellon Fellow in Urbanism and the Environment. Professor Lamb is also the co-founder of Crookedworks, a design-build firm that uses collaborative design and building projects to tackle complex urban challenges, including food security, cross-species living, and climate-change hazards. Professor Lamb completed his Masters of Architecture at MIT in 2010 and received his Bachelors of Art in Art History and Practice and Environmental Studies from Williams College in 2002.

Ayesha Mahmud, Assistant Professor, Department of Demography, is a demographer, who is broadly interested in the interplay between human population changes, environmental factors, and infectious disease dynamics. Her research draws on theory and methods from demography and disease ecology, to answer questions such as - why do outbreaks occur at certain times of the year? How and why does the mortality burden of infectious diseases vary over time? How do population travel patterns drive the spatial dynamics of outbreaks? How will global environmental and demographic changes alter the landscape of infectious disease burden in the future? She received her Ph.D. in Demography from Princeton University in 2017.

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Global Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2008), and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She has published articles in Meridians, Signs, Journal of Women's History, History of the Present, Economic & Political Weekly, Modern Asian Studies, Südasien-Chronik [South Asia Chronicle], Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and Asian Survey, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. She was a guest co-editor of a special issue of Feminist Economics on “Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities.” She currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Bangladesh Studies and a new Cambridge University Press book series titled "Muslim South Asia." She is Associate Editor (Central and South Asia) of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.