A Message from the South Asian Studies Council at Yale Chair: Rohit De

February 21, 2022
Dear Colleagues, 
I write to welcome you back to campus. We have a full calendar of events this semester and we look forward to seeing you, especially when we get back to events in person with chai. 

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay will be taking over as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for South Asian Studies this spring. We are grateful to Aleksandar Uskokov for his service as DUS last term. Swapna Sharma continues as Language Program Director.

We are also delighted to welcome new SASC associates. Kalindi Vora joins us as Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Ethnicity, Race and Migration. Prof Vora’s research engages with historical and contemporary social justice concerns connected to artificial intelligence and robotics technologies, on autoimmunity and patient self-tracking and self-treatment, and on establishing approaches to research in STEM fields informed by feminist, anti-racist and other social justice standpoint. Jane Lynch joins us as Lecturer and Associate Research Scientists at the Department of Anthropology. Dr Lynch is an economic anthropologist, and her research interests include the social analysis of corporations and corporate social responsibility projects; the political economy of artisanal manufacture; studies of materiality and material culture; and the anthropology of ethical commerce. 

Marjan Wadraki is an intellectual historian of South Asia and the Middle East with interests in the history of science, medicine and histories of migration. She is a postdoctoral associate in the Program in Iranian Studies, and is working on her book which traces the birth of scientific and medical institutions in South Asia through the lens of itinerant scientists and physicians.

The weekly South Asian Studies Colloquium, which meets on Thursdays at 4:30pm ET, began last week with a discussion of Jessica Nammakal’s book on Unsettling Utopia on French India and Decolonization. We will move to a hybrid format from February 24 with speakers on campus and meetings held in Luce 203. This semester also features a panel discussion on 50 years on the independence of Bangladesh bringing together historians, anthropologists, and political theorists; we have book discussions with Juned Shaikh on his new book on Outcaste Mumbai, Mircea Raianu on his prize winning book, Tata: The Global Corporation that Built Indian Capitalism and Vatsal Naresh, Sudipta Kaviraj and Karen Barkey on their edited collection, Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan, and Turkey. Other presentations include Ananya Chakraborty on slavery in the Konkan, Abhishek Kaicker on Mughal history writing, Ornit Shani on India’s first elections and Liza Olivier on colonial animal photography.

The South Asia Brown Bag Series on Wednesday noon curated by Chetana Sabnis (Political Science) begins from February 9th, with Shahana Shaikh (Political Science) presenting on her work on the protests around the citizenship act.

Please join us for as many events as possible and visit our website for regular updates.

Best regards, 
Rohit