GSA Faculty
Duke faculty will lead the Global Semester Abroad in each country, assisted by local faculty.
Dr. Anirudh Krishna
The faculty director for India will be Professor Anirudh Krishna of the Sanford School for Public Policy Studies.
ANIRUDH KRISHNA (Ph.D. in Government, Cornell 2000; Masters in Economics, Delhi 1980) is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. His research investigates how poor communities and individuals in developing countries cope with the structural and personal constraints that result in poverty and powerlessness.
For seven years between 2002 and 2008, he examined poverty dynamics at the household level: Why do some (but not other) poor people break out of poverty? How do people come to be poor in the first place? How many were not born poor but fell into poverty? For examining these questions, Krishna and his colleagues tracked movements into and out of poverty for more than 35,000 households in 400 communities of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru and North Carolina, USA (www.pubpol.duke.edu/krishna).
His book on these subjects, One Illness Away: Why So Many People Fall into Poverty while Many Others Move Out was published in 2010 (see news feature on study) . Krishna is author or co-author of five other books and more than forty journal articles and book chapters. Before turning to academia, Krishna worked for 14 years in the Indian Administrative Service, where he managed diverse initiatives related to rural and urban development.
Dr. Ralph Litzinger
The faculty director for China will be Professor Ralph Litzinger of the Department of Cultural Anthropology.
Ralph Litzinger received his doctorate from the University of Washington in 1994, and soon thereafter joined the Duke faculty. At Duke he was the Director of the Asian/ Pacific Studies Institute from 2002-2009, and is currently the university’s Advisor for Undergraduate Initiatives in China. He also directs the Duke Engage Beijing Migrant Labor Education Project. In 2008-2009, he co-convened the Mellon-Sawyer Foundation seminar, “Portents and Dilemmas: Health and Environment in China and India.”
Professor Litzinger has been doing research, teaching, and traveling widely in China since the mid-1980s. His early work on the history of socialism and market reforms in ethnic minority regions in China resulted in the 2000 Duke Press book, Other Chinas. In 2001, he began research on environmental activism and international conservation agendas in the Himalayan regions of the Tibetan Plateau. He is currently completing two book projects from this period of research, Ethics and Activism: Critical Environmentalism in New Millennial China and a collection of essays on Tibet, the Sichuan Earthquake and the Beijing Olympics called, The End of Shangri-la: Life Beyond Protest and Patriotism.
Drs. Kirti and Sharad Iyengar
Instructors for the second course in India will be Kirti and Sharad Iyengar, both medical doctors, founders of the NGO Action Research and Training for Health in Udaipur, India.
With an M.D. in Medicine followed by a graduate degree in Public Health, Sharad Iyengar worked for several years with the United Nations in India and abroad. He quit this position ten years ago and set up, together with his wife, Dr. Kirti Iyengar (also a M.D. with an advanced degree in Public Health), a NGO in Udaipur by the name of Action Research and Training for Health or ARTH (http://www.arth.in/). ARTH has extensive field operations in two parts of Udaipur district serving, through a variety of preventive and curative public health interventions, a population of more than 55,000 people. Additionally, they have active training and research programs, running regular in-service training programs for both senior- and junior-level public health officials, and engaging in action research that has resulted in published articles in national and international journals. Sharad serves on committees of the World Health Organization and the Indian Council of Medical Research. His active involvement at the grassroots is matched by his engagement in the worlds of policymaking and advocacy.
Dr. Yan Guo
Dr. Yan Guo will teach the second course in China.
Yan Guo is professor of the School of Public Health at Peking University, People’s Republic of China. Professor Guo’s research interests include health equity, the management of poverty alleviation, and the reproductive needs of adolescents in China. From 1992 to 1997, she served as associate professor at the Training Center for Health Management, School of Public Health, Beijing Medical University. Professor Guo worked as a consultant for numerous international projects including the Women and Reproductive Health and Micro Nutrition Project supported by the World Food Program; the Qinba Poverty Alleviation Project, sponsored by the World Bank; and UNICEF’s Middle-Term Review of Health and Nutrition Project. Between 1992 and 1997, she managed a variety of projects that focused on the evaluation of primary health care in rural areas of China. Professor Guo received an M.D. from Beijing Medical University, and an MPH from Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.
