9/29/08

Veena Das

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent book is Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, California University Press, 2006. She has worked on themes of violence, social suffering, health and disease, and anthropology of the everyday. Currently she is engaged in a longitudinal study of urban neighbourhoods in Delhi. Das is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Sciences for Developing Societies. She has received several honours including the Andrez Retzius Prize of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography and an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Chicago.

Deepak Mehta

Deepak Mehta is Reader at the Department of Sociology. He is the author of Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India, 1997 (OUP) and co-author of Living With Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life, 2007 (Routledge). He is currently working on the afterlife of the destruction of the Babri Mosque.