News

Due to technical reasons EASAS is not able to accept applications for membership until the end of January 2019. Other services remain unaffected by this. EASAS sincerely apologizes for any inconveniences and hopes for your understanding. EASAS is looking forward for new members to apply from February 2019 onwards.

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

• Call for Proposals for EASAS PhD Workshop 2019:
  
  The Call to Universities and Higher Education Institutions to host the 2019 EASAS Doctoral
  Workshop is now open and will be circulated among the members.
  The workshop will give PhD students an opportunity to receive feedback on their theses from
  senior scholars and fellow PhD candidates who are also working on South Asian topics. In
  addition, it will create networks between young students of South Asia and help them develop
  contacts with others. The doctoral workshop is envisaged as a two-day event for a maximum of
  16 PhD candidates and 6 faculty members from European universities, to be held at a host
  European university.
  
  For the complete Call and information click here.
  
  Please send your proposals to office@easas.eu by 31 January 2019.

• Publish in SAMAJ (South Asia Multidisciplinary Journal) - Call for Proposals:
  To all Conveners of Panels at the 25th ECSAS, Paris, July 2018: The call for proposals for the seventh and eighth SAMAJ-EASAS special issues is now open. You can find the call for proposals here.
  
  The Call is closed now.

• 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).

• Social Sciences Winter School in Pondicherry: "Labour and Development", December 3-7, 2018
  
  The Social Sciences Winter School in Pondicherry (SSWSP) has been designed as a programme of intensive and multidisciplinary training workshops addressing theoretical and methodological issues in social sciences research.
  
  The major thread of this 2018 Social Sciences Winter School will be to address societal challenges at the intersection between labour and development.
  
  The new deadline for registration is October 22, 2018.
  
  For more information and the Call click here.
  

• Job posting - Princeton University, Professor of Contemporary India (to begin Fall 2019)
  
  Princeton University seeks qualified candidates for a tenured professorship in any discipline, including the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, engineering and the natural sciences. Candidates are required to have regional expertise on India, knowledge of relevant foreign languages, and significant experience managing a center or program. In addition to contributing to their respective disciplinary department and to the wider research community of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), they are expected to strengthen regional course offerings at the University and, vitally, to broaden Princeton's international networks. Field of specialization is open.
  
  Application deadline is October 15, 2018.
  
  For more information click here.

• Call For Papers: South Asian Literatures in the World
  South Asian Literary Association Annual Conference, January 6-7, 2019, The Wits Hotel, Chicago, IL
  
  The South Asian Literary Association invites papers, panels, and roundtable proposals for the 2019 annual
  conference to be held in Chicago January 6-7 on the topic “South Asian Literatures in the World.” We invite
  work that investigates the cultural production of South Asian identity as a global phenomenon—which is to say,
  that thinks about how such production is generated globally, through international relationships, and in concert
  with production of identities of other nations and collective identities.
  You can find the Call For Papers here.
  
  You may submit an abstract for a paper, a panel proposal including abstracts and bios for all participants, or a
  proposal for a roundtable. All abstracts should be no more than 300 words, and biographic notes no more than
  75. The proposals for all need to be submitted by the hard deadline of July 31, 2018 online at
  http://www.southasianliteraryassociation.org/2019-sala-annual-conference-paper-proposal-form/
  
  You can direct your questions about the conference to Dr. Nalini Iyer and Dr. Madhurima Chakraborty at
  sala2019conference@gmail.com