Richard Bownas

Dr. Richard Bownas received his PhD in government from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and his master’s from the London School of Economics.  His PhD focused on farmers’ movements and their relation to environmental social movements in India.  He now specializes in the local politics and political sociology of Nepal, including post-conflict developments, post-disaster politics and reconstruction, and most recently, the politics and sociolotgy of religion in Nepal. 

Dr. Bownas’s Fulbright project is researching how people have perceived and responded to 30 years of democratization and party-political organization at the grass-roots level in Nepal.  Methodologically, the project is gathering oral histories from Nepali elders who have lived through tumultuous changes.  By careful classification of these oral histories by way of caste, gender, location, and occupation, the project is set to provide insights into the durability of Nepal’s nascent democracy and into its potential fault lines and vulnerabilities.