Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
Reason and the Image: On Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players)
South Asia Seminar: Keya Ganguly, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota This talk focuses on Satyajit Ray’s cinematic treatment of an episode from India’s late colonial history in Shatranj Ke Khilari (“The Chess Players,” 1977). I suggest that through...
Embodied Empiricism and the Respectability of Labour at the Madrasa Tibbiya Delhi
TAPSA: Sabrina Datoo, Department of History, University of Chicago This paper elucidates how the mores of the north Indian service-gentry were implicated in the reformation of Avicennian medicine in colonial India. The paper focuses on a single site, the Madrasa...
Sixteenth Annual South Asia Graduate Student Conference: “South Asia: The Political, the Public, the Popular”
South Asia Graduate Student Conference XVI: The Political, the Public, and the Popular For more information on the conference, including its schedule, please visit: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/sagsc/ Fri., Mar. 8 and Sat., Mar. 9 Friday, March 8 Keynote:...
“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...