TEACHING AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

I have 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 Trebuchet mentor and Vice Chancellor of Sai University. I have been tasked with helping Jamshed to create the Social Science curriculum offerings at Sai University, 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 am joined in this venture by Cody Valdez, my former student, and friend now for well over a decade. It is particularly exciting to have introduced Cody to Sai University where he became their Senior Lecturer and Senior Tutor residing in Chennai.

We are creating immersive educational opportunities, internships, and research experiences, many provided by my Trebuchet mentors and our colloquia lecturers. My appointment is for four years and will enable me to witness the evolution of this progressive and distinctive international interdisciplinary university. While primarily virtual for me, I will be on-site in Chennai as well. 

Cody has designed and is teaching 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 two-semester interdisciplinary social sciences curricula. Our students, the first entering class of Sai University, are 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 teaching assistants. Shaheer is with us again for 2022.

The Global Challenges colloquium has continued in the 2nd and 3rd years of Sai University in 2022 and 2023 with entirely different presentations. You can find the presentation posters and syllabi in descending order.

Along with Jyotsna Badrinarayanan, I created another course named Confronting and Resolving Global Security Challenges. To know more about the course click the button below.