Looking Back, Informing the Future: A Multidisciplinary Research Project on the 1947 Partition of British India
VIEW EVENT DETAILSPresented by the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University and Asia Society
2017 marks the 70th anniversary of the Partition of British India, as well as the launch of Harvard’s South Asia Institute’s major research on Partition. Panelists Prashant Bharadwaj, (Associate Professor, Department of Economics at the University of California, San Diego); Tarun Khanna (Director, Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School), Karim R. Lakhani (Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School) and Rahul Mehrotra (Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard University) discuss the complexities of large-scale human migration and resettlements. Such lessons can inform current cross-border displacement and the corresponding growth of urban settlements and cities. Moderated by Jennifer Leaning (François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights; Director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University).
Viewpoints is an annual series featuring prominent, visionary figures in the creative arts and is made possible by the generous support of Aashish and Dinyar S. Devitre.
Speaker Bios:
Prashant Bharadwaj is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in development and labor economics, focusing on the interactions between early childhood health, gender and education. His research affiliations include BREAD, CEGA, CERP and the NBER. He is currently an Associate Editor at Economic Development and Cultural Change. Prashant received his BA in Economics from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from Yale University.
Tarun Khanna, Director of the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, where he has studied and worked with entrepreneurs and investors in emerging markets worldwide. He was named Harvard University's Director of the South Asia Institute in the fall of 2010. He joined the HBS faculty in 1993, after obtaining an engineering degree from Princeton University (1988) and a Ph.D. from Harvard (1993), and an interim stint on Wall Street. During this time, he has served as the head of several courses on strategy, corporate governance, and international business targeted to MBA students and senior executives at Harvard. He currently teaches in Harvard College's undergraduate General Education core curriculum in a University-wide elective course on entrepreneurship in developing countries, and in HBS’ Owner/President Management executive education program. He is also the Faculty Chair for HBS activities in India and South Asia.
Karim R. Lakhani, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard University
Karim R. Lakhani is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, the Principal Investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab and NASA Tournament Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the faculty co-founder of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative. He specializes in technology management and innovation. His research examines crowd-based innovation models and the digital transformation of companies and industries. Professor Lakhani is known for his pioneering scholarship on how communities and contests can be designed and managed to achieve innovative outcomes. He has partnered with NASA, TopCoder and the Harvard Medical School to conduct field experiments on the design of crowd innovation programs. His research on digital transformation has shown the importance of data and analytics as drivers of business and operating model transformation and source of competitive advantage.
Jennifer Leaning, François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights; Director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University
Jennifer Leaning’s research and policy interests include issues of public health, medical ethics, and early warning in response to war and disaster, human rights and international humanitarian law in crisis settings, and problems of human security in the context of forced migration and conflict. She has field experience in problems of public health assessment and human rights in a range of crisis situations (including Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Kosovo, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Somalia, the Chad-Darfur border, and the African Great Lakes area) and has written widely on these issues.
Dr. Leaning serves on the boards of The Humane Society of the United States, and the Massachusetts Bay Chapter of the American Red Cross. She formerly served on the board of Physicians for Human Rights (an organization she co-founded), Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Oxfam America. She is Visiting Editor of the British Medical Journal, serves on the editorial board of Health and Human Rights, and is a member of the Board of Syndics at Harvard University Press. From 1999 to 2005, Dr. Leaning directed the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, during which time Dr. Leaning also served as Editor-in-Chief of Medicine & Global Survival, an international quarterly. From 2005-2009, Dr. Leaning founded and co-directed the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
* Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Rahul Mehrotra is Professor of Urban Design and Planning. He is a practicing architect, urban designer, and educator. His firm, RMA Architects, was founded in 1990 in Mumbai and has designed and executed projects for clients that include government and non-governmental agencies, corporate as well as private individuals and institutions. Mehrotra has written and lectured extensively on issues to do with architecture, conservation, and urban planning in Mumbai and India. He has long been actively involved in civic and urban affairs in Mumbai, having served on commissions for the conservation of historic buildings and environmental issues, with various neighborhood groups, and, from 1994 to 2004, as Executive Director of the Urban Design Research Institute. Mehrotra is a member of the steering committee of the South Asia Initiative at Harvard, and curates their series on Urbanization. He currently is leading a university-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck, called The Kumbh Mela — Mapping the Ephemeral City.
* Presenting on behalf of Professor Mehrotra is Diane Athaide. An architect in Mumbai before coming to the United States, Athaide is currently pursuing her master's degree in urban design from the Harvard graduate school of design. She has been working on the Partition Project with Professor Mehrotra.
Event Details
725 Park Avenue, New York, NY