CIRS Steering Committee

Uday Chandra is an Assistant Professor of Government. He received his B.A. in economics from Grinnell College and his PhD in political science from Yale University in 2013. He is interested in state-society relations, power and resistance, political violence, agrarian change, and the philosophy of the social sciences. His work has been published in the Law & Society Review, Critical Sociology, Social Movement Studies, New Political Science, The Journal of Contemporary Asia, Contemporary South Asia, and The Indian Economic & Social History Review. He has co-edited volumes and journal special issues on caste hierarchies, the ethics of self-making, the politics of the poor, and social movements in India. His first book, Resistance as Negotiation: Making States and Tribes in Modern India, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. He is also working on a book on religious nationalism and democratic politics in contemporary India and beyond.

Lynda Chinenye Iroulo is an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in Qatar. She is also an Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany; a Resident Fellow at the Africa Policy Research Initiative. Her research focuses on International Relations – International Organisations, African Regional Integration, Postcolonial and Decolonization Theories, and Africa In Global Politics

Eddie Kolla has taught history for 10 years at Georgetown University in Qatar. He has held research fellowships, most recently, at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. His work sits at the intersection of history, international relations, and law and includes Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2017). He is currently finishing a book on the history of passports. People take it for granted that they require a passport to travel. And yet, surprisingly, neither the form nor function of today’s passport is codified in international law. Rather, the story of how these little booklets developed is an incredibly idiosyncratic one, in which a number of features of travel documents throughout history haphazardly coalesced into the now-ubiquitous and indispensable passport, issued and accepted by states around the world but still lacking a solid foundation in international law.

Jeremy Koons is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Qatar. Koons studies the nature of knowledge and the nature of moral judgments. He is particularly interested in the ways in which knowing and judging are never solitary acts—our knowing and judging are inherently social, inherently tied to the larger collective, membership in which enables our own rational agency. Koons is the author of The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars (Routledge, 2019), the first in-depth work on this subject. He has also written or co-written two additional books as well as two dozen articles and book chapters on metaethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. His work has appeared in Philosophical Studies, The Philosophical Quarterly, Synthese, and numerous other journals and edited volumes.

Karine Walther is an Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, a Maîtrise and Licence in Sociology from the University of Paris VIII, and a BA from the American Studies Honors Program at the University of Texas, Austin. She is currently working on her second book: Spreading the Faith: American Missionaries, ARAMCO and the Birth of the US-Saudi Special Relationship, 1890-1955, forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press. Her first book, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 was published by UNC Press in 2015. Reviews of Sacred Interests can be found in the Times Literary Supplement, Diplomatic History, the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, and other academic journals. She is also currently working on two edited volumes, one focusing on the global history of industrial education (co-edited by Oli Charbonneau) and another on global histories and practices of Islamophobia (co-edited with Abdullah Al-Arian). Before joining Georgetown, Karine served as a visiting professor at Middlebury College, a postdoctoral fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.