United States President George W Bush [Images] has nominated Mumbai-born Jamsheed K Choksy, a professor at Indiana University, to be a member of the prestigious National Council on the Humanities for a six-year period beginning January 27.

Choksy is a professor of Central Eurasian studies as well as history, adjunct professor of religious studies and an affiliated faculty member of India Studies and of Medieval Studies at the Indiana University. He has also served as the chairman of the department of near eastern languages and cultures and as the director of the middle-eastern studies programme at IU.

Choksy's research examines the development of sectarian communities in Central Asia, the Near East, and South Asia -- where he has traveled extensively -- through interdisciplinary approaches involving anthropology, archeology, history, languages, linguistics, literatures, numismatics and religious studies.

According to a profile posted by Indiana University, Choksy was born on January 8, 1962, in Mumbai, attended elementary, middle and high school in Colombo and is now a citizen of the US.

His PhD was in the history and religions of the Near East and Inner Asia, with the major field of Iranian studies and the additional fields of archeology and Islamic studies, from Harvard University in 1991.

Before joining IU, he taught in the department of history and the international relations programme at Stanford University as a visiting assistant professor from 1991-1993. He was a member and a national endowment for the humanities fellow at the School of Historical Studies in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, from 1993-1994.