Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
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...
TAPSA: Genomic Histories of the Adivasi and Sinhalese Populations of Sri Lanka
Thursday, February 13, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Jose Antonio Urban Aragon, PhD Candidate, Human Genetics, University of Chicago Sri Lanka, yielding the oldest-yet evidence of Homo sapiens in South Asia (~36,000 years ago), is central to our understanding of the...
TAPSA: Unheard Melodies: Entangled Pasts of Modern Bengali Song
Thursday February 27, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Ronit Ghosh, PhD Candidate, Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Music, University of Chicago Departing from existing approaches that study the modern Bengali song exclusively as a literary...
2-Day Workshop: Beyond Modernism: The Formation of Buddhist Identities in Asia
2-Day Workshop: Beyond Modernism: The Formation of Buddhist Identities in Asia (9am - 5pm, Swift Common 1025 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637) This workshop seeks to move beyond an East/West axis in exploring the emergence and subsequent development of so-called...
Southern Asia Seminar: Footprints of the Prophet in Mughal India
Thursday, February 20, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Usman Hamid, Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Northwestern University This talk traces the role of relics associated with the Prophet Muhammad in Muslim devotion and piety in early modern South...
Southern Asia Seminar: Reading Unnameable Desires in Contemporary Pakistani Film
Thursday January 23, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Mehak F. Khan, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Notre Dame This talk explores new developments in contemporary Pakistani film, including the Cannes favorite Joyland (Sadiq, 2022), and Cake...
Inaugural Papiya Ghosh Memorial Lecture: “Gujarat to Delhi: Modi’s Strategies to Win and Retain Power”
Inaugural Papiya Ghosh Memorial Lecture: "Gujarat to Delhi: Modi's Strategies to Win and Retain Power," Christophe Jaffrelot, Avantha Chair and Professor, Indian Politics and Sociology, King's India Institute (5pm, Location TBA) Since his Gujarat years, Narendra...
Southern Asia Seminar: Formations of Feminist Thalaimurai: Intergenerationality, Memory and Care in Tamil Political Life
Thursday February 6, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Anusha Hariharan, Assistant Professor, Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Villanova University Based on ethnographic work with feminist collectives in Tamil Nadu, this talk attends to the intermediations...
TAPSA: Between ghṛṇā and dharma: The Rhetoric of Middle-caste Positioning in Colonial India
Thursday January 30, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 Sthira Bhattacharya, PhD Candidate, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago This talk examines the rhetorical moves through which spokespersons from three middle-caste...
Southern Asia Seminar: The Negro Our Aryan Brother’: Race, Caste, and Hindu Cosmopo-nationalism in the Transcolonial 1920s
Thursday January 16, 2025 - 5pm, Foster 103 J. Barton Scott, Associate Professor, Department of the Study of Religions, University of Toronto In 1925, Pandit Chamupati went on an Arya Samaj mission tour of British East Africa—presumably to avoid the scandal that...