23rd Feb 2017
Keynote Address: Compacts, Insurgencies and State Technologies in Medieval South India
Speaker: Daud Ali
Dr Daud Ali is an historian of pre-Mughal South Asia. He taught history for many years at SOAS, University of London, before relocating to Penn in 2009. His area of training and expertise is early medieval South Asia, but his research interests have expanded over the years. His research has focused on the history of mentalities and practices in pre-Sultanate South Asia, and he has published on a wide range of subjects, including courtly and monastic discipline, mercantile practices, conventions in erotic poetry and courtship, slavery, ideas of space, time and history in inscriptions, early Southeast Asian history, and, most recently, on gardens and landscape in the medieval Deccan. Future and ongoing projects include collaborative projects on the history of friendship in early and medeival South Asia, a translation of a Buddhist text on erotics, as well as a study of the production of the king Bhoja cycles in Western India.
24th Feb 2017
Keynote Address: Narcissism and Noir in Pushpamala’s Phantom Series
Speaker: Jisha Menon
Jisha Menon is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. She teaches courses at the intersection of postcolonial theory and performance studies. She received her M.A. in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her Ph.D in Drama from Stanford University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of religion and secularity, gender and nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization. She has published essays on the Indian partition, diasporic feminist theatre, political violence in South Asia, transnational queer theory, and neoliberal urbanism. She is co-editor, with Patrick Anderson, of a volume of essays, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) that explores the coimbrication of violence, performance, and modernity in a variety of geopolitical spaces. Her book, Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), considers the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of “mimesis” to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while also paying attention to the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also at work on a second project, Pedestrian Acts: Performing the City in Neoliberal India, which considers new narrations of selfhood that are produced at the intersection of neoliberal state, global market and consumer fantasy.