News

IMPORTANT: the 26th European Conference on South Asian Studies, ECSAS 2020 has been postponed until July 26-29, 2021. For further information regarding ECSAS 2020 please visit: https://ecsas2020.univie.ac.at/#mainwrapper and especially https://ecsas2020.univie.ac.at/faq/.

• EASAS Research Student Awards (ECSAS 2018 in Paris):

  One of the stated aims of the European Association for South Asian Studies is to encourage and

  support young scholars working in the field of South Asian Studies. In pursuit of this aim, the

  Association offered awards linked to its biennial conference. Awards were to be made for the most

  outstanding papers by currently registered research students presenting at the conference.
  
  Awardees EASAS Research Student Award 2018 (in alphabetical order):
  Madihah Akhter: A Wholly Unsuitable Heir: The Bhopal Sucession Case, 1924-26
  

  PhD Candidate, Dept. of History
  Stanford University, USA

  
  Madihah Akhter is a fifth year PhD candidate specializing in modern South Asian history. She received a Master’s in History from Tufts University and a Bachelor’s in History from UCLA. Her research and teaching interests include modern South Asia, gender, queer and transhistory, and global history. Her doctoral dissertation, titled, "In Her Own Right: Sovereignty and Gender in Princely Bhopal, 1901-1926," explores the mutual dependencies and contestations of sovereignty between princely rulers and imperial administrators in the twentieth century. Specifically, she excavates the possibilities of princely sovereignty in Bhopal under the direction of its ruler, Sultan Jahan Begum (r. 1901-1926). Bhopal, located in central India, was the only princely state under female rule in the twentieth century and was the second largest Muslim princely state in India. In this project, she interrogates the conceptual and practical articulations of "in her own right" through gendered space, history writing, anticolonialism, symbolism and succession. Her dissertation engages with political theory on early modern and modern sovereignty in South Asia, feminist analysis of performance and embodied sovereignties, and postcolonial scholarship on anticolonialism and nationalism.
  
  Sara Kazmi: Gender, Vernacular Tradition and the Politics of Voice in Punjabi Poetry: Radical Re-tellings of Hir by Amrita Pritam and Nasreen Anjum Bhatti

  PhD Candidate in Criticism and Culture
  Department of English
  University of Cambridge
  
  Sara Kazmi is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge. Her project explores literary radicalism in postcolonial Punjab, focusing on poets and playwrights whose work addresses the relationship between emancipatory politics in the contemporary period and vernacular genealogies of critique. Her research examines the reworking of folk forms by contemporary writers to address issues of gender, caste and class in the making of region and nation.

• The fifth EASAS Workshop on Price of Belonging took place at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld University, Germany, from 12 to 13 July 2018. During the two-day focused discussion group, it was intended to jointly work through and deepen understanding of human sacrifice that belonging implies by focusing upon specific case studies in different South Asian countries. The aim of the workshop was to look into the interior of human bonds that are less about a relationship between the self and a different ‘Other’ – an already established approach to
  investigate belonging and more of a relationship between the self and a distinct ‘Same’, a perspective that will guide us to the hidden yet scarcely understood spheres of belonging.
  The following questions were addressed: How do collectives make claims upon individual persons? How do individuals gain and secure their membership? How are individual and collective commitments (re)negotiated in everyday situations? What makes some people stay in a formation while others opt for an exit? What happens to those who
  are unable or unwilling to bear the costs? Themes of interest include: consequences of class, caste, ethnic and gendered belonging and membership; inter-marriage; individual navigation through collective constellations.

• The fourth EASAS Workshop on Worker-Contractors: Refiguring low-level labour market intermediaries in contemporary India took place at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK, on 7 July 2017.
  This one-day symposium was to examine on the formation and working practices of low-level contractors, understood as key figures underpinning India’s economic boom.

• The third EASAS Workshop on ‘Potent Substances’ between Asia and Europe: Redefining materia medica in Tibetan and Himalayan Medicine and Buddhist Ritual took place at the University of Vienna, Austria, from 1 to 4 September 2016. This workshop focused on how medical and ritual substances are identified and categorised in Tibetan traditions, as well as possible impacts on their ‘potency’ within recent EU pharmaceutical regulations.
  
  
  
• The second EASAS Workshop on South Asian Apparel Workers in the Post-Rana Plaza World: Worker Health Beyond the Factory Floor took place at the University of Edinburgh, UK, from 15 to 16 July 2016. This workshop focused on worker health in the garment industry since the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh in 2013.

• The first EASAS Workshop on Opening Up Intimate Spaces: Women Writing and Autobiography in India took place at the Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, Poland, from 19 to 20 May 2016. This workshop focused on Indian women’s writings in India. Most studies of India have tended to focus on the public and the political spheres, seeing them entirely in masculine terms. The fact of women’s much lower literacy levels, their containment within ideologies of femininity and domesticity, compounded by the deafening silence of the imperial archive on women’s experiences have led to the relegation of women’s writings to the margins of mainstream Indian history. This workshop follows an important shift in studies of Indian history towards a reappraisal of women’s roles in the making of pre-modern and modern India by focusing on their writings about their lives.

• The 12th  EASAS PhD Workshop took place at the University of Stuttgart from 19 to 21 September
  2019. Participants hailed from ten countries, in alphabetical order, from Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Twelve students’ chapters were presented by one of the fellow students and commented upon by a senior member of staff. The format of presenting and discussing chapters followed the usual pattern employed at EASAS doctoral workshops.
  The Stuttgart workshop had lively and intense discussions on all presented topics, which ranged from historical to anthropological, and linguistic to performative subject areas. The in-depth discussions offered students with maximum quality feedback on their work in progress.
  The 12th EASAS PhD Workshop was convened by Dr. Margret Frenz, FRHistS, FHEA, University of Stuttgart, and Dr. Georg Berkemer, Humboldt University Berlin.

• The 11th EASAS PhD Workshop in South Asian Studies was held from 22 to 24 September 2017 in Naples at L'Orientale University of Naples. The EASAS Doctoral Workshops take place annually and aim at giving PhD students the oppertunity to discuss their thesis with fellow PhD students and senior scholars who work on South Asia.
  The 11th EASAS Doctoral Workshop was convened by Dr. Stefania Cavaliere (L'Orientale University, Naples) and Prof. Dr. Alessandra Consolaro (University of Turin).

Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Hindi-Urdu at Wake Forest University

WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY's Middle East and South Asia Studies Program is seeking applications for a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor in Hindi-Urdu to start July 1, 2021. As a program, we are a large cohort of faculty across disciplines representing a variety of research and teaching interests pertaining to the Middle East and South Asia. This Hindi-Urdu position marks an expansion into the formal, permanent instruction of South Asian languages.

You can find the full Job Announcement for a Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Hindi-Urdu with the Middle East and South Asia Studies Program at WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA, HERE.

Please see also: https://hr.wfu.edu/careers/

Celebrate South Asia is a series of events recognising the University's connections to the region. This year events take place between 30 September to 23 October.

Details of all events and how to sign up are available HERE or on this main University page.

We would particularly like to flag up two events, but recommend that everyone checks out the website for more details of the whole programme.

• When: Monday 19 October, 4pm - 5.30pm
• Where: Zoom

Following her unmissable conversation with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at the 2019 Edinburgh International Book Festival, we are thrilled to welcome back one of the world’s best-respected authors to discuss her new book of essays, Azadi. The slogan of the struggle in Kashmir for what Kashmiris regard as the Indian occupation, ‘Azadi!’ is the Urdu for ‘Freedom!’. It also became a chant on the streets of India against the project of Hindu nationalism.

In the light of the Covid-19 outbreak, freedom has, Roy says, taken on another meaning and in a new book of essays she invites us to see the pandemic as a portal between one world and another. Here, taken from this year’s 2020 Edinburgh International Book Festival, she argues, is our opportunity to imagine a better future. Arundhati Roy’s own career as a novelist began with the extraordinary success of her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things in 1997. Since then she has published two further novels as well as a major collection of essays last year. From this recorded event, Roy is in discussion with essayist, broadcaster and journalist Bilal Qureshi. The event is free to attend but you must book via Eventbrite.

Sign up here and find out about other events such as the South Asian Student Society evening this Friday: https://global.ed.ac.uk/celebrate-south-asia