is a professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and a senior professor at the Hertie School in Berlin. He is an authority on cultural globalization, violence, cities, and media, with a special interest in South Asia. His books, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and The Future as Cultural Fact (London: Verso, 2013) have contributed ground-breaking ideas on the dynamics and effects of cultural globalization. His most recent book, co-authored with Neta Alexander, is Failure (London: Polity Press, 2019).