TEACHING AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

In 2021, I 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 current Trebuchet mentor and from 2021-2024 the Vice Chancellor of Sai University in-charge of all academics. I was tasked with helping Jamshed to create the Social Science curriculum offerings at Sai University and 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 at my invitation by Cody Valdez, my former student, and friend now for well over almost two decades. It was particularly exciting to have introduced Cody to Sai University where he became a Senior Lecturer in the Social Sciences and Humanities and a Senior Tutor residing in Chennai. He was my initial Teaching Fellow.

We created immersive educational opportunities, internships, and research experiences, many provided by my Trebuchet mentors and our colloquia lecturers. My appointment was for four years at my choice to enable me to witness the evolution of this progressive and distinctive international interdisciplinary university following the initial student cohort until their graduation.This turned out to be a virtual endeavor.

Cody designed and taught 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 mandatory two-semester interdisciplinary social sciences curricula. Our students, the first entering class of Sai University, were 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 my first teaching assistants. 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 following Sai University Page.

Along with Jyotsna Badrinarayanan, I created courses called Confronting and Resolving Global Security Challenges, a seminar on Power and Memory, a seminar on Middle East Politics and a senior honours research practicum.