Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
“The Hidden Histories of South Asian Chicago”
A fundraising event to support the South Asian American Digital Archive Celebrating 140 years of South Asian American history and the hidden stories of South Asians in Chicago. A fundraising event to support the South Asian American Digital Archive Thursday,...
South Asia Seminar: Brahmins Tryst With Brahminism
Suraj Yengde, Shorenstein Center Post-Doctoral Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School Can Brahmins participate in the anti-caste struggle? Has there been any history of Brahmins taking upon the Brahmin community to fight bigotry and oppression? History is laden with such...
South Asia Seminar: ‘We Were Always Buddhist:’ Dalit Historiography and the Temporality of Caste
Lucinda Ramberg, Professor in Anthropology, Cornell University In 1956 anti-caste philosopher and statesman Dr. B.R. Ambedkar called upon his followers to convert to Buddhism as the equalitarian religion of the original inhabitants of the subcontinent. Drawing on...
“Resounding Islam: Occluded Muslim Histories of Modern South Indian Rāga-Based Music”
Davesh Soneji, Associate Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania This talk examines the inaudible yet polyphonic pasts of modern South Indian rāga-based music by exploring the long and complex history of Islamic musical production in...
Workshop with Professor Alicia Turner
Alicia Turner is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Humanities at York University in Toronto. An expert in Buddhism in Burma/Myanmar, she is interested in the intersections of colonialism, nationalism, and secularism. Her first book Saving Buddhism: The...
“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...