Jamsheed K Choksy, a Mumbai-born professor at Indiana University, has been nominated as a member of the prestigious US National Council on the Humanities for six years from January 27.
The White House announced president George W Bush's nomination of Choksy, a professor of Central
Eurasian studies as well as history at Indiana University on Thursday.
A highly accomplished scholar and researcher, Choksy is also adjunct professor of religious studies and an affiliated faculty member of India Studies and of Medieval Studies at the University. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent US federal agency dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programmes in the humanities.
The "largest funder of humanities programmes in the US", it provides grants for high-quality humanities projects in four funding areas: preserving and providing access to cultural resources, education, research, and public programme.
Choksy has also served as Chairman of Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and as Director of Middle Eastern Studies Programme. Choksy was selected as the Government of India Research Fellowship lecturer in 1998.
His research examines the development of sectarian communities in Central Asia, the Near East, and South Asia-where he has travelled extensively- through inter-disciplinary approaches involving anthropology, archaeology, history, languages, linguistics, literatures, numismatics and religious studies.
Born January 8, 1962 in Mumbai, Choksy attended elementary, middle and high school in Colombo and is now a citizen of the US.
His Ph D was in the history and religions of the Near East and Inner Asia, with the major field of Iranian studies and the additional fields of archaeology and Islamic studies, from Harvard University in 1991. Before joining Indiana University, he taught in Department of History and the International Relations Programme at Stanford University as a visiting assistant professor from 1991-1993.
He was a member and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the School of Historical Studies in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, from 1993-1994.