David Ludden

David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalization. He first worked in South Asia as a public health intern when he was in college, in 1968, but in graduate school, in the 1970s, he migrated into studies and translations of Tamil literature and into research in economic and social history and development studies.

He received his Ph.D. in History in 1978 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he served on the faculty from 1981 until 2007. He chaired the South Asia programs at Penn and at the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Senior Scholars Program. He served as President of the Association for Asian Studies. His research concerns histories of development and globalization in very long-term perspective. Until 1993, he focused on southern India, and then he moved his work into Bangladesh and nearby regions of northeast India.

His published work includes four edited volumes, three monographs, and over 50 academic articles and chapters. His current writing project is a book on the reproduction and transformation of imperial forms of knowledge, power, authority, and inequality under contemporary globalization. Since arriving at NYU, in 2007, he has launched programs that now comprise an emerging Global Studies Network connecting schools, departments, disciplines, and world regions at NYU: the Global Cafe, Global Seminar, workshops and dissertation seminars are all based at the Institute for Public Knowledge, where he is a Senior Fellow. He will be on leave in Dhaka for a year starting August 2009.