Who We Are
Ulka Anjaria is a professor of English and the Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University, affiliated with the South Asian Studies program. She is the author of three books, Realism in the 20-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012), Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (2019), and Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema (2021). She is also the editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015) and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (2024) and has published on Indian and Pakistani literature and film in a variety of scholarly and public-facing venues.
Esha Senchaudhuri is the Assistant Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities, where she focuses her energies on the 'Humanities and Global Affairs' project area and the 'Education Policy & Social Justice' working group. She currently serves as a Council on Foreign Relations Education Ambassador for Higher Education. Esha received her PhD in philosophy at the London School of Economics and Law Diploma focused on economic regulation from the University of London, and was an early career policy fellow in Humanities, Arts & American Institutions at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. There she supported the National Commission on Language Learning and helped establish the National Commission on Arts. She also traveled with the Academy's Global Security team to NATO and the European Parliament to present her research on the protection of cultural heritage in war zones. This work was sponsored through an initiative of the Getty Trust. In 2022, Esha was also a subject matter contributor to the strategic re-alignment process of Americans for the Arts.
Andie is a master's student in the philosophy department. She completed her BA in philosophy from Colgate University, and worked as a middle school assistant teacher at a charter school in Boston before joining Brandeis. She's passionate about the role of the humanities in education and life generally.
Steering Committee
Andie Berry is an assistant professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University. She specializes in contemporary African American theater with a focus on women’s writing, twentieth- and twenty-first century performance cultures, and experimental drama. She is currently at work on a a book manuscript that re-examines the imaginative possibilities of the black body onstage in the United States’s post-post-civil rights era. She holds a Ph.D. in English and African American Studies from Yale University.
Yuval Evri is an assistant professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. He is a cultural historian who specializes in Sephardi/Arab-Jewish modern history and culture. He is particularly interested in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century. His current book project traces the invention of the Mizrahim/Sephardim as go-betweens and mediators on the borderline that emerged between the Jew and the Arab and between Hebrew and Arabic and explores how the fluidity inherent in this position became a source of resistance to the dominant national and monolingual forces. His last book, titled: The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, was published by Magnes Press in 2020. The English edition of Evri's book, titled The Return to Sepharad and the Erasure of al-Andalus, is scheduled for publication by Indiana University Press in 2026.
María J. Durán teaches courses on Latinx literatures and cultures. Her research focuses on political agency and the performance of resistance in 20th- and 21st-century U.S. Latinx cultural productions. Her other research interests include Latinx theater, Latinx speculative fiction, and third world feminisms. Durán is currently working on her solo-authored monograph, which examines structural violence and grief in contemporary Latinx literature to illuminate manifestations of care in vulnerable Latinx communities and to theorize future visions of care work anchored in feminist scholarship.
A.J. Murphy is a scholar of American military history, the history of capitalism, and the history of gender and sexuality. Their current book project - Pentagon Capitalism: Management Expertise and the Transformation of the Cold War U.S. Military - recounts how defense leaders reorganized the U.S. military on the model of the private, for-profit firm.
Gowri Vijayakumar is an associate professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, affiliated with the South Asian Studies Program at Brandeis. She is the author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global Aids Crisis, published by Stanford University Press in 2021.