SAGSC: South Asia Graduate Student Conference

Locations: Swift Hall Common Room and Ida Noyes Hall
Program

Day One: Friday, 6th April @ Swift Hall Room 208

[8:45] Opening Remarks by John Kelly (Chicago)
[9:00 - 11:30] I. Performance, Politics and the Imagination: Space in South Asia
Discussant: Kathy Morrison

Bertie Kibreah (Chicago): Dueling Fakirs and Phantom Shrines in Bangladesh
Yuthika Sharma (Columbia): Toward the Tabula Rasa: The imagination of the city and its hinterland in panoramas of Delhi
Manjusha Nair (Rutgers): Rituals of Solidarity: The hidden meanings in the performance of trade union politics
Dipti Khera (Columbia): Spectacle’s Nostalgia: Betwixt space and history in Udaipur
[11:30 - 12:45] Lunch
[12:45 - 2:25] II. Authorship and Agency: Narrative Positions and Travels
Discussant: Yigal Bronner

Xi He (Chicago): Remarks on the Linguistic Peculiarities of the Chinese versions of the Lalitavistara in Light of the Sanskrit and Tibetan Versions
Shweta Sachdeva (SOAS): Tawaif and the Ghazal: Poetry and the Writing of History
Elaine Fisher (Chicago): A Book with No Author: Does Mimamsa Escape the Intentional Fallacy?
[3:00 - 5:00] III. Interrogating Names in History and Ideology
Discussant: Sascha Ebeling

Dwaipayan Sen (Chicago): Between ‘Hindu’ and ‘Refugee’: Jogendranath Mandal and the ‘problem’ of caste in Partition-era Bengal
Priti Mishra (Minnesota): In search of a proper name: Naming Orissa in the early twentieth century
Benjamin Schonthal (Chicago): Symbolism and Separatism: The Case of Tamil Tiger Monuments
[5:15 - 6:00] Break
Poster Session

Siddharta Puri (UCLA): Capturing the Third Gender: Rethinking Photographs of Mona Ahmed
[6:00 - 7:00] Keynote @ the Ida Noyes Library Lounge

Biju Mathew, “Stars, Bhakts and Designer Intellectuals: An Anthropology of South Asian Academy in the US”

[7:00 - 9:00] Conference Dinner & Poetry Reading by Srikanth Reddy

Day Two: Saturday, 7th April @ Ida Noyes Library Lounge

[9:00 - 9:30] Coffee
[9:30 - 11:30] IV: Inside/Outside the text in pre-modern South Asian literary worlds
Discussant: Valerie Ritter

Sonam Kachru (Chicago): Till the cows come home: critics on words and their worlds in the Nirukta
Anand Taneja (Columbia): Letters Copied to the Lord of the Djinns: the Texts and Contexts of Contemporary Religious Practice in a ‘Medieval’ Space
Prashant Keshavmurthy (Columbia): Authorship and the Project of Literature: a Reading of Mir Hasan’s Sihr-ul Bayaan
[11:45-12:30] Lunch (provided)
[12:30 - 2:30] V: Inside/ Outside the Academic Form: Explorations of alternate critical forms
Discussant: William Mazzarella

Bulbul Tiwari (Chicago): ‘Who am I speaking to?’: The readers, audience and others of scholarship
Sheena Raja (Columbia) and Nina Raja (Rutgers): ‘Ghosts in the Media’: An Exploration of South Asian Stereotypes in American Entertainment Television
Kristin Bloomer (Chicago): Talking in Tongues and in Tamil: Alternate Voices in the Study of Religion
[2:30 - 2:45] Tea Break
[2:45 - 3:45] VI: Roundtable: ‘Traveling Between Two Worlds: The Public Intellectual in South Asian Scholarship’

Participants: C.M. Naim [moderator], Wendy Doniger, Boria Majumdar, Biju Mathew, Siddharta Deb, Shekhar Krishnan
[4:00- 5:00] Keynote II @ Ida Noyes Theater (Third Floor)

Sudipto Chatterjee, “Meeting the Man of the Heart: a Lecture-Demonstration.”

[5 - 5:15] Concluding Remarks by Dipesh Chakrabarty (Chicago).
[6:00 - 2:00] The Pub.