David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalization in the Department of History at New York University. He first worked in South Asia as a public health intern, but in graduate school, 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, the Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright, and he served as President of the Association for Asian Studies. His research concerns histories of development and globalization in very long-term perspective; it focused on southern India until 1993, when 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 2008, he has launched innovative programs to foster research on many aspects of globalization across academic boundaries that separate schools, departments, disciplines, and world regions: The Global Cafe, Global Seminar, workshops and dissertation seminars – all based at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He will be on leave in Dhaka for a year starting August 2009.