About Pankaj Jain

Dr. Pankaj Jain is the Head of the Dept of Humanities & Languages and Chair of The India Centre at FLAME University. Earlier, he was the founding co-chair of India Initiatives Group and Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas, a tier-1 American university. He holds a Ph.D. 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, India. Prof. Jain has over twenty-five years of work experience in both academia and industry. He is currently working on his fourth monograph, Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach, co-editing the Encyclopedia of Hinduism and a volume on Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion. He compiled Jains and Hindus' history in America for his third monograph, Dharma in America: A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora. He is also the author of the award-winning Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability and Science and Socio-Religious Revolution in India: Moving the Mountains. His articles have appeared in several academic journals and on the Huffington Post, Washington Post's forum On Faith, Times of India's Speaking Tree, and Patheos. Dr. Jain is widely quoted in various American and Indian media outlets. In July 2020, the New York Times interviewed him, and in 2019 Morgan Freeman interviewed him for the section on Jainism in the Netflix series The Story of God. He is a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship for Environmental Leadership and Wenner-Gren Grant, among many other grants. He was nominated for the Sustainability Leadership Award from Memnosyne Institute. He tweets at @ProfPankajJain, and his podcast #IndicExplorations is on Spotify, Apple, Google, YouTube, and other platforms.

Dr. Pankaj Jain is the Head of the Dept of Humanities & Languages and Chair of The India Centre at FLAME University.

Pankaj's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Pankaj:

Arvind Sharma, "The Ruler's Gaze: A Study of British Rule Over India from a Saidian Perspective" (HarperCollins, 2018)

September 1, 2021

The Ruler's Gaze

Arvind Sharma
Hosted by Pankaj Jain

Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is a seminal work in the field of postcolonial culture studies. It critiqued Western scholarship about the Eastern wo…

Janaki Bakhle, "Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition" (Oxford UP, 2005)

August 25, 2021

Two Men and Music

Janaki Bakhle
Hosted by Pankaj Jain

Janaki Bakhle's book Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford UP, 2005) is a provocative account of the d…

Jeffery D. Long, "Jainism: An Introduction" (I. B. Tauris, 2009)

August 11, 2021

Jainism

Jeffery D. Long
Hosted by Pankaj Jain

Jainism evokes images of monks wearing face-masks to protect insects and mico-organisms from being inhaled. Or of Jains sweeping the ground in front o…