Events

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,...

Southern Asia Seminar: Aditya Balasubramanian, Senior Lecturer in History

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...

TAPSA: Tremors of Freedom: Hydroelectricity and the Reverberations of Self-Determination in Western India

Thursday, May 1, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Sachaet Pandey, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Chicago Over the course of the 20th century, a large hydroelectric grid took shape in the rain-drenched mountains that cut across Western India. Storing...