Prof. Arjun Appadurai (New York University)

Arjun Appadurai was the Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Till recently, he was Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also held a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences. Previously, Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School. He was formerly William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India).

During his academic career, he has held professorial chairs at The New School, Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania, and has held visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa, Columbia University and New York University. He serves on several scholarly and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe and India. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (1996). His previous scholarly publications have covered such topics as religion, cuisine, agriculture and mass culture in India.

At MPI-MMG Prof. Appadurai worked closely with the Department of Religious Diversity and co-developed with Prof. van der Veer the ‘Urban Aspirations in Mega-cities’ project.