Pankaj Jain(III)

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 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. In addition, 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 and quotes have appeared in several academic journals and on 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. In July 2020, the New York Times interviewed him, and in 2019 Morgan Freeman interviewed him for the section on Jainism in the National Geographic 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. In addition, he was nominated for the Sustainability Leadership Award from Memnosyne Institute. He tweets at @ProfPankajJain, and his podcast #DiscoverIndia is on Spotify, Apple, Google, YouTube, Gaana, and other platforms.