Events

Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
Southern Asia Seminar: ‘Can there be development without political rights: Debating Adivasi/indigenous people development in India’
Bhangya Bhukya Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of history at the University of Hyderabad The pertinent question I will ask in this talk is this --can there be development without political rights? This question...
Southern Asia Seminar: The Political Ecology of Flood and Migration in Cambodia: A Comparative Case study of Rural-urban center
Try Thoun Lecturer/researcher and program coordinator for the Department of Sustainable Urban Planning and Development (DSUPD), Faculty of Development Study, Royal University of Phnom Penh Like many other cities in Southeast Asia, Cambodia cities are experiencing...
Doing Being Other in Global Singapore
All events free and open to the public Description The Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore is known for being an exceptionally multiracial, multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious place, and commentators often say that a Singaporean can look or...
Twentieth Annual South Asia Graduate Student Conference: South Asian Stories and Storytelling
The theme for the SAGSC XX is Stories and Storytelling. Stories and their tellings are the bedrock of social life. Origin myths, national histories, religious texts, political manifestos, personal life histories — each of these shape understandings of the human...
Erotic and Devotional Entanglements: The Śṛṅgāra Songs of Tāḷḷapāka Annamayya
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History, Emory College of Arts and Sciences In this talk, I examine the relationship between eroticism (śṛṅgāra) and devotion (bhakti) in Telugu poetry...
TAPSA: Postcolonial Bohemians: World-Poetry and “Troublesome” Poets in 1960s Bengal
Supurna Dasgupta, PhD Candidate, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations I track two different trajectories of world-poetry that thrived across continental barriers in postcolonial Bengal and in 1960s North America. Both these trajectories were...
TAPSA: Images of Belonging: Lawyers in the People’s Court
Krithika Ashok, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology The Supreme Court of India, since the 1980s, when it first articulated its “public interest litigation” jurisdiction, has often been flatteringly described as a “people’s court.” This reputation, however,...
TAPSA: The Dawning of the Persian Age: Occult Iranophilia in Akbar’s Hindustan
Shaahin Pishbin, PhD Student, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Akbar’s reign (1556-1605) as Mughal emperor has always been notable for his massive sponsorship of Persian letters and Iranian intellectuals. This paper considers what was at stake in the...
TAPSA: Singapore’s Counter-Colonial Aesthetics: The Semiotic Sink of the Westernized Enemy Within
Wee Yang Soh, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology Within sociopolitical discourse in modern Singapore, comparisons with Western powers, primarily the USA and the UK, have become de rigueur. Such comparisons have spanned discussions about race and minority...
TAPSA: “But we are farmers too”: Figures and Refusals of Labour in the Gurgaon-Bawal Automobile Industry
Tanima Sharma, PhD student, Anthroplogy In this talk I examine how 'worker' and 'farmer' identities blur amongst labouring subjects who are part of Haryana's Gurgaon-Bawal automobile industry. In contrast to traditional leftist and trade union vocabularies of a...
TAPSA: Ethnographic Untouchables: Raciology, Ancestry, and Estrangement in Muslim Bengal: 1872–1905
Tamir Reza PhD Student, SALC A Bengali Muslim poet and essayist, Nowsher Ali Khan Yusufzai (1864-1924) wrote the following verse in a 1905 poetry anthology: “O India, the garden of eternal flowering, farewell, farewell, farewell now/ We had stayed for too long...