Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
Southern Asia Seminar: Bassam Sidiki, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin
Thursday, November 20, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Bassam Sidiki, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin Hosted by the Committee on Southern Asian Studies
Whither Tamil Research? A Workshop in Honor of E. Annamalai
Friday – Saturday, October 3 - 4, 2025 , Foster 103 Whither Tamil Research? A Workshop in Honor of E. Annamalai This workshop brings together students and scholars of Tamil who trained at the University of Chicago with E. Annamalai, along with E. Annamalai himself,...
India’s Eucalyptus Affair: Development, Environmental Management, and Politics c. 1960-1990.
Thursday, October 2, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Aditya Balasubramanian, Senior Lecturer in History, Australian National University This talk sketches a history of postcolonial development as environmental (mis)management by exploring the tensions introduced by...
TAPSA: Negotiating Care and Precarity: Social Reproduction, Intersectionality, and Informal Work in Urban India
Thursday, May 15, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Priyanjali Mitra, PhD Student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago This talk examines how working-class households in Gurgaon’s urban villages are sustained through gendered labor, negotiations of precarity, and...
Minority Identities and Vernacular Visual Culture: An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Friday – Saturday, May 9 - 10, 2025 - 9am - 8pm both days, The Franke Institute for the Humanities Minority groups are often underrepresented in official archives, which has resulted in their continuing marginalization in historiography. Critical archive scholars...
A Celebration of the Academic Legacy of Professor Norman H. Zide
Friday, May 9, 2025 - 12pm - 5pm, Foster 107 Dr. Norman H. Zide (1928-2023) was Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and South Asian Studies and former Department Chair. For three and a half decades he created a center for the study of the Munda language family of...
South Asia Seminar: Constraints of Form in the Avantisundarī
Thursday, May 8, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Janet Um, Lecturer, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia The Avantisundarī (7th c.) is a Sanskrit prose composition best known for providing an account of its author, the poet and theorist Daṇḍin. This...
Jashn-i ‘Alam: A Celebration of Muzaffar Alam and his Scholarship
Thursday, May 29, 2025 10:00am - 6:30pm - Friday, May 30, 2025 9:00am - 5:00pm, Foster 103 Muzaffar Alam (Emeritus, George V. Bobrinsky Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations) is widely recognized as one of the most influential contemporary scholars...
2025 Chicago Tamil Forum Keynote: Extimacy and Intimacy: Caste and Ethnicity in Sri Lanka and South India
Thursday, May 22, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Sharika Thiranagama, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University Thiranagama draws upon Lacan’s notion of the “extimate,” understood as the other in the heart of the intimate, first to describe how...
Literary Progressivism in Tamil South Asia, c. 1940-1970
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 - 11:30am - 1pm, Foster 103 Rajesh Venkatasubramanian, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali, Punjab Progressivism in art and literature emerged...