IndOx Strategy Board
The Initiative is run by the India-Oxford Strategy Board (SB), a university-wide body with representatives from all five divisions - Humanities; Mathematical Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS); Social Sciences; Medical Sciences Division; Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) - and key colleges with an interest in India.
The Executive Board, a sub-committee comprised of members from the SB, focuses on the implementation of the decisions taken by the Strategy Board.
Board Members
Nandini Gooptu is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at ODID and Fellow of St Antony's College. She was Head of Department between 2012 and 2016.
Educated in Calcutta and at Cambridge, and trained as a social historian, she is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-Twentieth Century India (Cambridge University Press, 2001), editor of Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India (Routledge, 2013), and joint-editor of India and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, Oxford History of the British Empire series, 2012).
Simon Glenn is Research Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum. He is a Co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded OXUS-INDUS research project, working to create a new typology of Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coinage.
Radhika Khosla is the Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and Research Fellow at Somerville College, and Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, School of Geography and the Environment. She works on examining the productive tensions between urban transitions, energy services consumption and climate change, with a focus on developing country cities. Radhika leads the Oxford Martin School's interdisciplinary and multi-country programme on the Future of Cooling. She also leads the climate change research under DFID's India-UK Global Partnership Programme on Development, is a contributing author to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and lead author of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report (2020). Radhika is a member of the UK government’s UK-India Advisory Council. She has her Undergraduate and Master’s degree (M.Phys) in Physics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in the Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago.
Nishant Kumar is a researcher jointly based at Edward Grey Institute, University of Oxford, and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII). In Delhi, he studies opportunistic animal responses to resources provided by humans, and how centuries of coexistence have tied the urban ecology of commensals with religiously founded patronage and ritual animal feeding by people. Currently, he is interested in understanding the socio-economic impacts of scavenging ecosystem services provided by opportunistic commensals and how their biocultural links are vital for a sustainable urban future in South Asia.
Mallica Kumbera Landrus research interests focus on India, particularly with regard to the intersection of art, architecture, religion, politics and socio-economics. She is especially interested in issues of cultural translation, focusing on works and built environments created for and by colonial powers, and by emerging cultures that were themselves hybrid, transnational and diasporic.
Mallica is Keeper (Head) of the Eastern Art Department in the Ashmolean Museum, where the collections span more than 5,000 years of cultural and artistic development, from the Islamic Middle East, China, Korea, Japan, South and Southeast Asia. Her curatorial responsibilities include South and Southeast Asian art. She is a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, and Associate Professor of the history of Indian art.
Mallica joined the Ashmolean in 2012, initially as Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Curator. She is on the editorial board for publication in Studies in Asian Art and Culture at the University of Bonn, and she is a Trustee of the Charles Wallace India Trust.
Before Oxford, she was a senior lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She has also held teaching, research, curatorial and/or management posts at institutes such as Princeton University, Brown University and the Jaipur City Palace Museum. She was the first Director of Princeton’s Global Programme in India.
Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. She is the author of Aesthetic Hysteria (2007) and What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2014), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for 2015. Mukherjee's third monograph, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, will be published by Cambridge University Press (2021). This is a work of literary and cultural criticism which examines the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and poverty in the context of global cities in India, the US, and the UK. Mukherjee has edited multi-authored volumes, including After Lacan, and published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as PMLA, MLQ, Contemporary Literature, and Criticism. She is co-editing (with Ato Quayson) a collaborative volume of essays titled Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (Cambridge UP, 2022). Mukherjee was John Hinkley Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University in 2019 and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. Her research has been supported by grants from the British Academy, the AHRC, the Wellcome Trust, and the John Fell Fund.
Ankita Pandey is a Departmental Lecturer for the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Her research focusses on citizenship in practice, civil society-based activism, social movements, and legal mobilisation in India. She has taught at various universities in India for over a decade.
Anwesha Roy is a Departmental Lecturer in Indian History and Culture in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. She is a historian of Modern India, with expertise on a range of subjects on colonial South Asia – politics of mass mobilizations, communalism and ethnic violence and peace efforts. She currently teaches courses for the Modern South Asian Studies (MSAS) program such as Research Methods, Gender and Society in India, and Social History of Colonial India.
Her first book was published in 2018 by CUP, titled Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-1947, which explored the interconnections between extreme hunger and destitution during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 and solidification of community identities into communal ones. This was a significant historical intervention into understanding communal violence that shook Bengal between 1946-47. She has also published on Gandhi’s peace measures and more recently, on the role of rumours regarding the Second World War in animating the violence against the colonial state during the Quit India Movement between 1942-45.
Arjune Sen is Associate Professor, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. He trained at the University of Oxford, studying at Corpus Christi College. In his first summer in Oxford he completed a placement with Professor Simon Shorvon at The Institute of Neurology which essentially initiated all that has followed. Having completed an intercalated degree in Physiological Science, including a dissertation with Professor Colin Blakemore, he went to clinical school in Oxford before beginning medical training initially in Oxford and then in London.
In London, Arjune was trained predominantly at The Royal London Hospital and the National Hospital and undertook his PhD with the Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy at Queen Square, sponsored by the MRC and the Guarantors of Brain, studying the molecular basis of neuronal loss in refractory epilepsy. Having completed Specialist Training and a Locum Consultant Posting at The National Hospital, he then went to Sydney during 2012, predominantly to learn to read Video-EEG during an Epilepsy Fellowship with Professor Ernie Somerville.
Srusti Palakshappa is an undergraduate student reading Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Somerville College. She is currently the President of the Oxford India Society (OIS), which serves as a home for Indians and non-Indians alike to celebrate Indian culture and explore political, economic, and social issues relevant to India today.
Andrew Brown is the Senior International Officer in the University of Oxford's International Engagement Office. He is an ex-officio member and represents the Central University Administration on the Board.
Marwa is the Programme Manager for the India Oxford Initiative (IndOx). Working closely with the Strategy Board, she is responsible for managing IndOx activities, and facilitating its sustained growth. Marwa is the main point of contact for the IndOx and can be contacted at indox@ashmus.ox.ac.uk for all IndOx related matters.