Sunil Bhatia, associate professor of human development, was named for the award by president of theory and philosophy division of the American Psychological Association.
This award is presented to a psychologist each year, who, within ten years of having earned a doctorate degree, has made promising contributions to theoretical or philosophical psychology.
Bhatia, who has been with the Connecticut college -- ranked among the most selective private liberal arts colleges in the nation since 1999 -- focuses on how the formation of post-colonial diaspora, globalisation, and transnational migration have forced people 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, globalisation, 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 forthcoming. 'Terms of Difference: Culture, Identity and the Indian-American Diaspora.'
His book is based on a two-year ethnography of the Indian American diaspora in southern Connecticut. Bhatia's book analyses how the Indian-American middle-class diaspora speak about the various ways in which their bodies, accents, cultures and selves are racialised and marked as different.
The work on the Indian American diaspora shows that many professional Indian Americans 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.
