Iqbal Singh Sevea
By Asia Samachar | Singapore |
Iqbal Singh Sevea, the newly appointed Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), has been tasked to ensure that the institute remains at the cutting edge of rigorous research on South Asia in Singapore.
The associate professor will also have to ensure that ISAS will become a valuable bridge between policy makers, government leaders, corporate leaders, technological innovators and civil society representatives in Singapore and South Asia.
” In this regard, one immediate target is to establish ISAS as an important hub for research on S/outh Asia in Southeast Asia,” he tells Asia Samachar in an email.
Iqbal, a visiting associate professor with the Department of History at NUS, is the fifth director of the research institute. He took over the new role effective 1 Jan 2022. ISAS’ deputy director is Hernaikh Singh.
The mission of ISAS is to produce research on contemporary South Asia and to promote an understanding of South Asia and to communicate knowledge and insights about it to policy makers, the business community, academia and civil society, in Singapore and beyond.
Iqbal noted that South Asia and the world are changing in important ways and it will be important for ISAS to be able to anticipate emerging trends, produce timely reviews of key developments and provide objective and well researched perspectives.
“South Asian states are poised to encounter a series of evolving geopolitical, economic, environmental, socio-political and multilateral opportunities and challenges in the near future. Both the region and the world are changing in important ways,” he said.
In the coming years, he said ISAS will be attuned to researching on areas like: tracking the digitization of economies in South Asia; analyzing ongoing technological revolutions including the realm of space technology; reviewing the evolving landscape of multilateral and minilateral institutions; studying issues related to sustainability and climate change; and tracing South Asia’s engagement with Southeast Asia within the terrain of wider global shifts.
Sevea is an internationally recognised scholar of contemporary and modern South Asia whose core research focuses on South Asian politics, social and political thought, and governance.
Previously, he was an associate professor with the Department of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where he was a faculty member from 2012 to 2021. From 2018 to end 2021, he was also a visiting research associate professor at ISAS.
Prior to this, he was an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of the Contemporary Islam Programme at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at the Nanyang Technological University.
He is the current Vice-President of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and has also served on the committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Sevea is the author of the books, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Islamic Political Thought in Modern South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2022).
He holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in History from NUS and a master’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
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