Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
“Burmese Buddhist Identity, Gender and Colonial Secularism”
Alicia Turner, Associate Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, York University This talk charts a genealogy of Buddhist identity and religious difference in Burma and the ways it has created the preconditions of violence in the present. It seeks to bring...
“Reconstitutions: Women’s Performance and Aestheticized Caste Politics in Urban South India”
Theater and Performance Studies Workshop by Davesh Soneji, Associate Professor, Chair of Graduate Studies, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania Davesh Soneji is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of...
“Buddhists’ Contribution to South Asian Lexicography: Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan”
A talk by Lata Mahesh Deokar Lexicography is one of the oldest traditions of language analysis in South Asia, beginning with the compilation of nighaṇṭus or “word-lists” that focused on “rare, unexplained, vague, or otherwise difficult terms” that occurred in the...
TAPSA Talk: Representing and Reclaiming a Mother’s Authority in a Tibetan Female Buddhist Lineage
Peter Faggen, doctoral candidate in History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School This presentation in conjunction with my current dissertation-in-progress analyzes motherhood (both the representation of and actuality) and the construction of...
TAPSA Talk: Neither ‘Slaves’ nor ‘Unfree Labor:’ The Hari Movement and the Failure of Language and Analogy
Mishal Khan, doctoral candidate in Department of Sociology, University of Chicago How was the metaphor of “slavery” deployed by movements struggling against oppression in early twentieth-century India? In this presentation I explore this question by examining the...
Magazines and World Literature Workshop
A workshop with Francesca Orsini (SOAS, UK), Paola Iovene (EALC), Hoyt Long (EALC) and Sascha Ebeling, of UChicago, on the theme of the magazine and world literature. Much of the recent debate on world literature has revolved around either the curriculum and...
“Identity, Performance and Gender in Pakistan,” a lecture by Sheema Kermani
Through her own personal experience of creating, choreographing, and performing as a dancer and theatre practitioner on the Pakistani stage, and in the process of exploring and discovering a new Pakistani cultural identity, Sheema Kermani will try to lay out an...
TAPSA talk: “Indian Madrasas and Change: Evolution of the Educational System and Curriculum of the Arabic Program at Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1866 – the Present”
Aamir Bashir, doctoral candidate in Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago Modern scholarship on Indian madrasas has often deemed them to be beholden to an outdated curriculum first devised in the 18th century. Despite the...
Screening of Janani’s Juliet, a film by Pankaj Rishi Kumar
Synopsis: Deeply disturbed by a spate of honor killings in India this documentary sees Indianostrum, a Pondicherry based theatre group, setting out to introspect the implications of caste, class and gender through an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet....
[A Talk with Ambai] Body in Living Spaces: Reading, Writing and Archiving Women
This talk will be about ways of viewing contemporary Tamil literature, the acts of reading, writing and translation and about the need to archive women's history, women's lives and women's expression. The talk will attempt to cover a wide range of experiences from...