Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
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...
Southern Asia Seminar: By Her Own Free Will: Non-Dual Reinterpretation of a Śākta Tantric Tradition in the Yoginīhṛdaya
Anya Golovkova Assistant Professor of Religion, Lake Forest College Following the composition of the earliest tantras elucidating the worship of Tripurasundarī, Śrīvidyā (Tradition of the Auspicious Mantra) was reinterpreted through the lens of non-dualism in...
Archiving the History of Modern Bengali Song
The musical genre called “adhunik Bangla gaan” or the “modern Bengali song” is a critical part of the history of modernity in Bengal. Yet this history remains largely undocumented and dispersed in public and private collections. Please join us for a presentation on...
TAPSA: Female Laborforce Participation and Intimate Partner Violence: The Role of Social Norms
Rubina Hundal, PhD student, Harris School of Public Policy Female labor force participation is often positively associated with domestic violence, consistent with backlash theory. How does the social acceptability of women’s work change this relationship? Using...
Global Anti-Gender and Anti-LGBTQ+ Politics: Historical Continuities, Transnational Connections, Contested Futures
About the Event In recent years, social movements and political campaigns challenging women’s rights and LGBTQ+ equality have mobilized publics across the globe, from West Africa to Central and Eastern Europe, South Asia to North America. Even as some countries...
Southern Asia Seminar: Bhartṛhari’s view of language: is sphoṭa a mystic entity?
Mithilesh Chaturvedi, Professor, Department of Sanskrit, University of Delhi In Bhartṛhari’s philosophy, language and thought are not two distinct entities. Before speech manifests itself, it remains identified with the meaning. Thus, thought and language exist...
Film Screening of Jai Bhim Comrade, Followed by Discussion with Filmmaker Anand Patwardhan and Ritika Kaushik
For thousands of years, India’s Dalits were abhorred as “untouchables,” denied education and treated as bonded labor. By 1923, Bhimrao Ambedkar broke the taboo, won doctorates abroad, and fought for the emancipation of his people. He drafted India’s Constitution...
Southern Asia Seminar: Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena, 1200-1550
Anne Blackburn, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University Based on Blackburn's new book, this talk presents case studies from locations in what are now Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, and draws larger historical and methodological...