News

The deadline for submitting proposals is 10 May 2019.

Proposals have to be sent directly to the conveners Dr Margret Frenz and Dr Georg Berkemer at <margret.frenz@hi.uni-stuttgart.de> and <georg.berkemer@staff.hu-berlin.de>. The EASAS Council will select participants for the workshop and communicate the results by the end of May 2019. Chosen participants will then have to submitthe chapter/paper they are presenting in Stuttgart by 1 August 2019.

Applicants must be members of EASAS at the time of submission of the application for funding.
Please go to https://www.easas.eu/become-a-member/ to become a member.
 

You can find the complete Call here.

Dear Member of EASAS,

due to the technical delays in facilitating membership applications the organisers of the European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) 2020 in Vienna have decided to extend the deadline for the submission of Panel Proposals.

The Call for Panels will be open until 5 May, 2019.

For information and Panel Submission go to https://ecsas2020.univie.ac.at/

The panel submission is open from 4 February until 5 May, 2019. Please go to the
conference website: https://ecsas2020.univie.ac.at/

EASAS membership required. Please note that all panel conveners must be EASAS
members at the time of submission. (Join here: https://www.easas.eu/become-a-member/)
At least one of the conveners must be based at a European institution.

For the complete Call for Panels click here.

We look forward to seeing you in Vienna in 2020!
Martin Gaenszle and Birgit Kellner (Conveners) and Danuta Stasik (EASAS President)

• The website for the ECSAS 2020 in Vienna is now online: https://ecsas2020.univie.ac.at/
  More content will be added in due course.

• 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 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).

South Asia Anthropology Group UK (SAAG) 2019 Call for Papers

“Narratives of Transition: Everyday Politics and Social Change”

For SAAG 2019 we propose to focus on ideas of transformation, change and transition. This is to draw attention to how powerful historical processes are experienced, negotiated and embodied in empirical scenarios and in ethnographic writing, and to move towards new analytical concepts. Rather than just focus on the ways in which historical categories, power structures, relationships and rituals are maintained, we ask how they are being transformed or modified in contemporary South Asia. What has shifted in the context of the seemingly immutable socio-political categories, like religious nationalism, political factionalism, tribal identity, ritual or caste? What can moments of change, and voices claiming new transitions, tell us about the societal and cultural dynamics on the subcontinent today? How do contemporary South Asians imagine futures beyond historically rooted categories? And what are the limits of these narratives of transition?

The SAAG annual conference will be held at LSE Anthropology Department on the 19th and 20th of September 2019. The theme for this year will be “Narratives of Transition: Everyday Politics and Social Change”. To participate, please send a paper title and an abstract of up to 250 words to s.i.fuchs@lse.ac.uk and t.herzmark@lse.ac.uk by the 27th May 2019. A limited number of travel grants will be available for students and colleagues from South Asia and for scholars and PhD students with lower incomes.

You can find the complete Call here.