Events

Friday - Saturday, April 25 - 26, 2025 - 9am - 5:30pm both days, The Franke Institute for the Humanities Join Anna Schultz (UChicago), Sumanth Gopinath (U of Minnesota), and Fiona Boyd (UChicago) for Country Music as Theory—a two-day conference from April 25-26...

Swara Sudha: Celebrating Rama Navami

Friday, April 25, 2025 - 6pm - 8:30pm, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel Welcome to Swara Sudha: Celebrating Rama Navami! Join us for a vibrant celebration at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, featuring veena maestro Ramana Balachandhran, vid. Akshay Anantapadmanabhan on...

Eclectic Geographies of Tamil Music

Thursday, April 10, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Davesh Soneji, Associate Professor, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania This talk considers the somatic and sensorial practices of music, dance, and theatre among Tamil-speakers as sources of global...

TAPSA: Standard Differences, Different Standards

Thursday, April 3, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Shubham Shivang, PhD Student, Departments of Anthropology and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago This talk takes up the “problem” of standardization in the North Indian language of Bhojpuri, categorized as a...

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...

South Asia Seminar: Pūrṇavarman’s Prints: Sanskrit Epigraphy as Indigenous Practice in Early West Java

Thursday, April 24, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Elizabeth A. Cecil, Associate Professor, Department of Religion, Florida State University The earliest surviving Sanskrit inscriptions from Java, sponsored by the fifth-century ruler Pūrṇavarman, embed royal authority in...

South Asia Seminar and Ethnoise Talk: Kathak Storytelling and Transformation in Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 - 4:30pm, The Joseph Regenstein Library 270 Sarah Morelli, Professor and Chair, Departments of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, University of Denver Kathak’s storytelling tradition enables dancers to embody multiple, often contrasting...

South Asia Seminar: A New Discovery in the Study of Hindu Law: An Early Unpublished Commentary on the Yājñavalkya Dharmaśāstra

Thursday, March 27, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 David Brick, Associate Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan This talk will introduce a rare new addition to the corpus of Dharmaśāstra literature: an early unpublished commentary on the...

TAPSA: The Atmospheric Discontent of Make-in-India

TAPSA: “The Atmospheric Discontent of Make-in-India,” Ashima Mittal, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago (5pm, Foster 103) This talk examines the mediation of economic and social interests that are enacted through the framework of...

2025 South Asia Graduate Student Conference: Theorizing Capitalism in South Asia

South Asia exemplifies the contradictions of contemporary capitalism: a rapidly expanding stock market with high return for investors and a high aggregate economic growth have continued to coexist with unprecedented ecological crises, uneven-development, and...