Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
Southern Asia Seminar:The Administration of Pollution: Evidence from Crop Burning in South Asia
Saad Gulzar Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University Air pollution in South Asia is one of the largest public health emergencies on the planet, responsible for a million deaths annually. A third of the pollution is caused...
TAPSA: Images of Belonging: Lawyers in the People’s Court
Krithika Ashok, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology The Supreme Court of India, since the 1980s, when it first articulated its “public interest litigation” jurisdiction, has often been flatteringly described as a “people’s court.” This reputation, however,...
Southern Asia Seminar: Wandering Wonderworkers: Madari views of place and space in Maharashtra and India
Shreeyash Palshikar Fulbright Nehru Fellow 2019-2020 I An Affiliate of the UPenn South Asia Center I Fusion Magician Itinerant magicians, jadoowallas or madaris, have astounded audiences in South Asia since antiquity. They fascinated pre-Mughal, Mughal, and...
TAPSA: The Dawning of the Persian Age: Occult Iranophilia in Akbar’s Hindustan
Shaahin Pishbin, PhD Student, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Akbar’s reign (1556-1605) as Mughal emperor has always been notable for his massive sponsorship of Persian letters and Iranian intellectuals. This paper considers what was at stake in the...
TAPSA: Singapore’s Counter-Colonial Aesthetics: The Semiotic Sink of the Westernized Enemy Within
Wee Yang Soh, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology Within sociopolitical discourse in modern Singapore, comparisons with Western powers, primarily the USA and the UK, have become de rigueur. Such comparisons have spanned discussions about race and minority...
Southern Asia Seminar: Launch of Shailaja Paik’s new book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity
Shailaja Paik Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Cincinnati Shailaja Paik's first book Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014) examines the nexus...
“A Cultural History of South Asian Literature in an Age of Transition (1700-1800)”
This workshop will bring together the scholars involved in a new publication project dedicated to the history of South Asian literature in the eighteenth century. The volume is part of a wider publication project with Bloomsbury titled A Cultural History of South...
Erotic and Devotional Entanglements: The Śṛṅgāra Songs of Tāḷḷapāka Annamayya
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History, Emory College of Arts and Sciences In this talk, I examine the relationship between eroticism (śṛṅgāra) and devotion (bhakti) in Telugu poetry...
TAPSA: “But we are farmers too”: Figures and Refusals of Labour in the Gurgaon-Bawal Automobile Industry
Tanima Sharma, PhD student, Anthroplogy In this talk I examine how 'worker' and 'farmer' identities blur amongst labouring subjects who are part of Haryana's Gurgaon-Bawal automobile industry. In contrast to traditional leftist and trade union vocabularies of a...
TAPSA: Ethnographic Untouchables: Raciology, Ancestry, and Estrangement in Muslim Bengal: 1872–1905
Tamir Reza PhD Student, SALC A Bengali Muslim poet and essayist, Nowsher Ali Khan Yusufzai (1864-1924) wrote the following verse in a 1905 poetry anthology: “O India, the garden of eternal flowering, farewell, farewell, farewell now/ We had stayed for too long...