David Lelyveld, a historian of South Asia and Islam who most recently served as program officer for South and Southeast Asia at the Social Science Research Council in New York City, has been named executive director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.

He was appointed to the post by Ronald J. Herring, Cornell professor of government, who became the center's director in August.

At the Social Science Research Council, Lelyveld participated in restructuring the council's international programs, administering conferences and fellowships and securing government and foundation funding for new ones.

For the past decade he also has been dean of students in the School of General Studies at Columbia University, serving as acting associate dean and director of Reid Hall Programs in Paris for part of that time. At Columbia he also taught in the departments of history and Middle East languages and cultures, was the South Asia book review editor for the Journal of Asian Studies and was the South Asia editor for the Encyclopedia of Asian History.

Lelyveld also has served on the faculty of the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota and as a senior program associate at The Asia Society.

"David offers broad intellectual reach, extensive administrative experience in a peer institution and familiarity with the world of granting agencies and foundations," said Herring in announcing Lelyveld's recent appointment. He added, "Perhaps the most amazing thing about his commitment to this job is that he gave up a month of spring in Paris as an invited lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales to be with us!"

As executive director of the Einaudi Center, Lelyveld will be directly responsible for several of the center's programs, including the Bartels World Affairs Fellowship, Travel Grants and Fulbright programs, and he will supervise the staff at the Einaudi Center's Uris Hall location.

"Perhaps most important," Herring said, "David will work with groups of faculty to find new areas of interest, ascertain what they need to work on these interests and match the interests to funding sources. Of particular importance is finding alternative or supplemental funding for the six National Resource Centers we have won under Title VI federal funding competition. Federal support is uncertain, and new proposals from other universities are making the competition stiffer all the time."

Lelyveld received his bachelor's degree in British history and literature at Harvard University and his master's and doctoral degrees in history at the University of Chicago, followed by postdoctoral work in sociolinguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, 1978; Oxford 1996) and currently is working on The Fate of Hindustani: Language, Colonialism and the Nation, most recently on a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"I come to the Einaudi Center with a considerable commitment to international scholarship," Lelyveld said. "This is a time of crisis and opportunity for those who are concerned with promoting research and education about the world and using what we learn to respond to urgent problems, some of which are longstanding while many are new. The old boundaries of world 'areas' have been called into question, and, certainly, the interconnections among diverse parts of the world are more salient than they appeared to be in the past.

"All of this means that international studies must be reinvented and redeployed if we are to continue to think new thoughts and learn new things."

The Einaudi Center is named after the late Goldwin Smith Professor of Government Emeritus who founded Cornell's International Studies Center in 1961. Mario Einaudi was the eldest son of Luigi Einaudi, Italy's first president after World War II. According to its mission statement, the center is designed "to serve as the umbrella organization for international programs at Cornell University by providing leadership in an environment where scholars from all colleges can meet and work on international subjects."