Pankaj Jain

Pankaj Jain, Ph.D., पंकज जैन Head, Humanities, and Languages Chair, The India Centre Professor, Philosophy & Religious Studies FLAME University ORCID 0000-0003-3906-0855 https://linktr.ee/ProfPankajJain

Designations and Degrees: Professor Pankaj Jain is an internationally recognized academic leader in Sustainability, Jain Studies, Film Studies, and Diaspora Studies. He is the Head of the Department of Humanities & Languages and the Chair of The India Centre at FLAME University. Earlier, he was the founding co-chair of India Initiatives Group and Associate Professor in the Departments of Philosophy & Religion and Anthropology at the University of North Texas, a tier-1 American university. He holds a PhD from the University of Iowa and an M.A. from Columbia University (both in Religious Studies). His B.E. was in Computer Science from Karnatak University. Prof. Jain has over twenty-five years of work experience in academia and industry.

Books: He is working on his fourth monograph, Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach (Springer, 2023), and has coedited the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions (Springer, 2022) and Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion (2023). His most recent monograph was Dharma in America: A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora (Routledge 2019). He is also the author of the two monographs: award-winning Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability (Routledge 2011) and Science and Socio-Religious Revolution in India: Moving the Mountains (Routledge 2015).

Articles and Media Presence: His articles have appeared in several academic journals and the Huffington Post, Washington Post, Economic Times, Times of India, Speaking Tree, and Patheos. In addition, Dr Jain is widely quoted in various American and Indian media outlets, including NBC, CBS, and BBC. In July 2020, the New York Times interviewed him; in 2019, Morgan Freeman interviewed him in his National Geographic series The Story of God.

Awards: He received the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship for Environmental Leadership and the Wenner-Gren Grant, among others. In addition, he was nominated for the Sustainability Leadership Award from Memnosyne Institute.

Social Media Outreach: His social media handle is @ProfPankajJain, and his podcast #DiscoverIndia is on Spotify, Apple, Google, YouTube, Gaana, and other platforms.