Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
“Gate of India:” Early Modern Qandahar
Talk by Dr. Neelam Khoja. Qandahar was a borderland fort-city: the eastern most frontier for the Safavids, and western most frontier for the Mughals. As such, it was a site for contestation, and it volleyed back and forth between these two empires. Qandahar was a...
The Language Disciplines: A Figure for the South Asian Humanities
Talk by Andrew Ollett, Junior Fellow, Harvard University’s Society of Fellows, PhD, Columbia University (2015) According to an origin story that the Jain monk Jinasēna told in the ninth century, the arts and sciences began when R̥ṣabha, who would later become the...
On Literary Activism, or a Philosophy of Creativity
South Asia Seminar: Amit Chaudhuri, Writer, Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia In the last four years, a series of symposiums on "literary activism" took place in Calcutta, Delhi, and Oxford, attempting to open up a fringe space...
The Politics of Pleasure: The Case of Wajid ‘Ali Shah
Natalia Di Pietrantonio completed her PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University in 2018 and her M.A. in South Asian Studies at Columbia University in 2011. Her current book project, Erotic Visions: Poetry, Literature, and Book Arts, critically...
Manifest Anxiety: Managing Religious Conversion in Early 20th Century British Malaya
TAPSA Talk: Hanisah Binte Abdullah Saini, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago In the early decades of the 20th century, the expanding colonial administration in British Malaya provided attentive reports on cases of conversion into Islam. This was despite...
Building Hinduism in the Land of the Khmer: From Liṅga Mountain to Prosperous Lord
Public lecture by Elizabeth A. Cecil, Assistant Professor, Religions of South & Southeast Asia, Florida State University Elizabeth A. Cecil is a historian of South and Southeast Asian religions with Sanskrit and Hindi as her primary research languages. Her...
From Weber to Varāha: Toward an Astrological Hinduism
Public Lecture by Marko Geslani, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of South Carolina Marko Geslani is a historian of religion specializing in ritual studies and medieval Hinduism. His first book, Rites of the God-King: Śānti and Ritual Change in...
Surā in her Cups: Writing a History of Alcohol and Drugs in Pre-modern South Asia
South Asia Seminar: James McHugh, University of Southern California, Dornsife James McHugh discusses his book project on the history of alcohol in South Asia from the Vedas through the early second millennium CE and beyond. He will give some examples of the ways...
Imperial Infection: An Ecological History of the Third Plague Pandemic in Bombay, India, 1880-1920
TAPSA: Emily Webster, Department of History, University of Chicago The third plague pandemic looms large in the historiography of colonial India. This attention is warranted, given the disproportionate effects of the pandemic: out of a total of 14 million deaths...
“Visual Amplification and the Remaking of Alandi’s Sacred Skyline”
South Asia Seminar: Anna Schultz, Department of Music, University of Chicago Every year, hundreds of thousands of varkaris travel to Alandi to visit Sant Dnyaneshwar’s samadhi and listen to devotional songs. For several decades, these songs have been sonically...