BASAS is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Jahnavi Phalkey, Founding Director of the Science Gallery, Bengaluru, as the new Editor of the Association’s flagship journal, South Asian Studies. This is an important development for BASAS as the Association works to broaden the scope of the journal and increase its distribution. Dr Phalkey started her academic career at the University of Heidelberg, following which she was based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, France, and Imperial College London. She has previously held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London, and was Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin). Dr Phalkey was also external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.

She is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and have co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. Drawing on her research, Dr Phalkey also produced-directed a documentary film Cyclotron about the world’s oldest functional particle accelerator.

BASAS would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr Deborah Sutton, Editor of South Asian Studies from September 2015, for her excellent service to the journal over the past six years. Dr Sutton has initiated a series of workshops to help scholars work towards submitting their work to the journal, and Dr Phalkey intends to continue with this idea.

Jahnavi’s Vision Statement:

“South Asian Studies has a continuing role to play in bringing together scholars from across disciplines and in deepening the attention to visual cultures. I want to further strengthen scholarship on the South Asian experience by placing it within a broad understanding of the Global South – especially Africa, Latin America, and East Asia.”