By SAT News Desk
Melbourne, 6 May: Prof. Ceaig Jeffery, leading world expert on contemporary India, will replace Prof. Amitabh Mattoo as next Director, Australia India Institute (AII) of the University of Melbourne. He is currently Prof. of Development Geography at the University of Oxford. He will take up his five-year appointment in October 2015.
Professor Jeffrey is the author of six books including Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford University Press, 2010) and Keywords for Modern India (with John Harriss; Oxford University Press, 2014). His scholarly output has been academically acclaimed even as its significance for public policy has been recognised.
A Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, Professor Jeffrey is currently leading a large project funded by Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council on educated unemployed youth in South Asia. He was recently elected a Fellow of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences, and also contributes regularly to BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian. Professor Jeffrey will also be taking up a professorial position at the University of Melbourne’s School of Geography.
Professor Amitabh Mattoo has returned to India to serve as the Honorary Director of AII@Delhi, and Professor of International Relations at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Professor Mattoo described Professor Jeffrey as a “great successor; an inspired choice” and a “truly exceptional scholar with credentials to position the Australia India Institute as the leading academic and policy centre for the study of India across the English-speaking world.”
– SAT News Service.
