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Sigmund Koch Award for human development professor

March 28, 2006

Sunil Bhatia, associate professor of human development, who last year received the college's highest award for teaching, has now received a prestigious award for research.

The Sigmund Koch Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology award is presented to a psychologist each year who is within 10 years of having earned a doctorate degree and has made promising contributions to theoretical or philosophical psychology.

News of the 2006 award came from the president of theory and philosophy division of the American Psychological Association. The division is eclectic, with members from many specialty areas of interest. Their common interest is the philosophy of psychology and the social sciences, as well as the social foundations of psychology.

Bhatia, who has been with Connecticut College since 1999, concentrates his research on how the formation of postcolonial diasporas, globalization, and transnational migration have forced us to redefine the meaning of culture, identity and self in the fields of theoretical and cultural psychology. Bhatia has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on issues related to language, globalization, immigrant identity and cultural psychology.

In 2005, Bhatia received Connecticut College's prestigious John King Teaching Award. In 2001, the students of Unity House awarded him the Tyrone Ferdnance Award for excellence in teaching and community service. He is the author of Terms of Difference: Culture, Identity and the Indian-American Diaspora (forthcoming, New York University Press). His book is based on a two-year ethnography of the Indian diaspora in southern Connecticut.  Bhatia's book analyzes how the Indian-American middle-class diaspora speak about the various ways in which their bodies, accents, cultures and selves are racialized and marked as different. The work on the Indian diaspora shows that many professional Indians who have come to the United States deal with the contradiction of acknowledging their difference on one level while keeping their racial and ethnic differences fairly hidden.

His research provides a framework for rethinking how transnational migrants maintain, resist and reinvent their identities in the wake of enormous cultural change and conflict. His research shows that acquiring knowledge about issues of self and identity becomes all the more critical in the face of sweeping demographic changes in the United States and Europe, where encounters with diverse histories, languages, religions, and ethnicities have emerged as central to the daily lives of many urban, metropolitan cultural and global spaces.

Students in the department of Human Development study developmental patterns and how each unique individual is impacted by the biological, social and cultural environment. View Bhatia's faculty profile.

For more information contact: Amy Martin (860) 439-2526; a.martin@conncoll.edu