Sunila S. Kale, a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, has been elected as the next president of the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her four-year term will begin on July 1, 2026. She will succeed Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University) who has been president since July 1, 2018.
Professor Kale has provided the following piece, which includes her reflections on taking up the office of president during these challenging times.
I’m honored to have been elected as the next president of AIIS by the delegates who represent the AIIS consortium of universities and colleges. My term as president won’t begin officially until July 2026, but I look forward to working with the Institute’s current president, Sumathi Ramaswamy, as president-elect beginning in July 2025.
I am a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. I have a BA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Though I’m trained as a political scientist, my research and teaching are broadly interdisciplinary in their questions, methods, and arguments, engaging the fields of energy studies, political economy, and yoga studies. I joined the University of Washington as an assistant professor in 2007, and for six years, from 2015 to 2021, served as Director of the South Asia National Resource Center and Chair of the graduate program in South Asia Studies.
My publications include Electrifying India (Stanford University Press 2014, which was awarded the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences by AIIS), and Mapping Power (co-edited with Navroz Dubash and Ranjit Bharvirkar, Oxford University Press 2018). I’ve also published essays and shorter pieces for journals and edited volumes in the social sciences, international studies, energy studies, comparative area studies, and yoga studies. My most recent book, The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India (co-authored with Christian Lee Novetzke, Columbia University Press 2025), charts a genealogy for yoga as a political idea over millennia. We analyze how this concept of yoga operates in a handful of ancient Indian texts and then connect these ideas to the modern period when yoga’s varied meanings animated strands of anti-colonial nationalism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
I’ve been associated with AIIS for the last twenty-five years. I’ve benefitted from the Institute’s rich and varied language programs as a student of Marathi (2000), its important mandate to fund dissertation research as a junior fellow (2002-03), and its support for ongoing scholarship as a senior fellow (2015-16). I’ve also served as an elected trustee of AIIS twice (from 2016-2019 and currently for a term that began in 2024), as a member of the fellowship selections committee (2020-21), and on the institute’s investment committee (2020-2023).
Like so many of us, I believe that AIIS is essential to the ongoing vitality of research, teaching, and study of India and South Asia across the humanities, social sciences, and arts. The Institute’s language programs and regional offices, research fellowships, Centers for Ethnomusicology and Art and Archaeology, dissertation-to-book workshop and other publication projects, and support for study abroad programs all play a crucial role in sustaining current members of our field and building foundations for the future. I have immense gratitude and respect for my colleagues who established this important organization and have carried its legacy into the present, and it will be a privilege to take a leadership role in AIIS’s efforts to train and support new generations of students and leaders. I look forward to working closely with the elected Board of Trustees, the Institute’s many delegates who represent its consortium members, the executive committee members who do much of the Institute’s work, and the Institute’s staff and directors based in the USA and India.