Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. CSAS Lecture Series | Widows under Hindu Law: an Overview (September 13, 2019 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/64842 64842-16460996@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 13, 2019 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

This talk will present a broad history of the Hindu widow, as she is treated within works of the voluminous, two-millennia-long tradition of classical Hindu law known as Dharmaśāstra. Specifically, it will show how the opinions of jurists working within the Hindu legal tradition changed over time on four major issues related to Hindu widows. These issues are: widow remarriage and levirate; a widow’s right to inherit; widow self-immolation or sati; and widow-asceticism. This talk will then argue that the shifting opinions of Hindu jurists on these four issues are, to a significant extent, causally related to one or another and that they allow us to identify and track major shifts in orthodox Brahmanical attitudes toward women during the early medieval period (c. 500-1300 CE).

David Brick is assistant professor of Sanskrit literature at the University of Michigan. His research deals with diverse aspects of early India and Sanskrit literature with a special focus on the influential tradition of classical Hindu law known as Dharmaśāstra. His first book, Brahmanical Theories of the Gift: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of the Dānakāṇḍa of the Kṛtyakalpatura (Harvard Oriental Series 2015), comprises the first critical edition and translation into any modern language of a dānanibandha, a classical Hindu legal digest devoted to the culturally and religiously important topic of gifting. His next major project will be a comprehensive study of widows under Hindu law.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 02 Aug 2019 15:21:55 -0400 2019-09-13T16:30:00-04:00 2019-09-13T18:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion David Brick, Assistant Professor of Sanskrit Literature, University of Michigan
CSAS Thomas R. Trautmann Honorary Lecture | Early Readers and Early Readings of the Mahābhārata (September 20, 2019 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/65321 65321-16571515@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 20, 2019 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

The Sanskrit Mahābhārata did not receive a commentary until the eleventh century. Well before then, however, it had become a central feature of Indian high culture, adapted by poets and dramatists, deliberated on by philosophers and aestheticians. Over the past century scholars have usefully examined these early treatments for what they tell us about the history of the Mahābhārata’s text. The commentaries, some of which establish a version of the text, have been put to similar text-historical use.

In this lecture I will argue for the value of the material that lies outside the boundaries of the epic proper, not in writing the history of the text, but in writing the history of that text’s meaning to its readers. An interest in the history of the reception of ancient canonical texts through their commentaries and related paratexts has gained prominence in the study of the literary traditions of other parts of the world, because of its inherent interest and its utility for intellectual history. With some exceptions, the Indological field has remained hesitant about reception studies, in part because it is perceived to open the door to anachronistic readings, thereby violating a governing disciplinary principle, that of historicism. And yet built into this Indological stance is a contradiction, due to the huge extra-academic importance in the present of Sanskrit texts like the Mahābhārata.

In 1942, the founding editor of the Poona edition, V.S. Sukthankar, delivered a series of seminal lectures, ‘On the Meaning of the Mahābhārata,’ that is representative of the quandary. Sukthankar proposed a meaning for the epic working from within the text itself. He did not rely on the commentators, epitomizers, poets, or literary theorists, yet in ruling out possibilities he did use as an argument the brute fact of the importance of the Mahābhārata to the Indian people. The idea of the Mahābhārata as India’s national epic whispers through the twentieth century scholarship, and yet its popularity in the present is neither an automatic result of its antiquity nor an accident of modernity.

The text was composed to create a remembered past. Over time its transmitters adjusted that memory and the text itself as they performed it, codified it, and used it as a point of departure. Survivals of this process are abundant in the Mahabharata’s poetic and dramatic recreations and occasional pieces, and especially in its ancillary literature: its commentaries, its versified summaries, its indices, and its ‘satellite texts,’ that is, marginal verses and other materials, some of which crept into the body of the epic over time.

If for nothing else, the history of the reception of the itihasa of the Bhārata clan through this material can serve as a way to confirm or disconfirm historical claims about the epic’s meaning, either as invented or as original, especially when the claims are presented as justiciable only by experts, or when the claims pretend to speak for a collective indigenous understanding that is inaccessible to those not native to the culture. Special reference will be made to episodes with elephants, either actual or imaginary, and to the Arthaśāstra.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:14:12 -0400 2019-09-20T16:30:00-04:00 2019-09-20T18:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Christopher Minkowski, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford
India’s Religious Traditions (October 2, 2019 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/64578 64578-16388947@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 2, 2019 10:00am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (50+)

India is home to the ancient religious traditions, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. They differ significantly from Abrahamic religions on the idea of Divinity, soul, and afterlife. They have evolved over time and are open to further interpretations in the future. The lectures for those 50 and over will include their philosophies, historical evolution, and their role in the contemporary socio-political landscape. Instructor Venkat Lakshminarayanan grew up in India and is a follower of Hindu tradition. Sessions will meet Wednesdays from 10-11:30 am from October 2 through November 27 (no class on October 9).

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Class / Instruction Wed, 24 Jul 2019 16:25:05 -0400 2019-10-02T10:00:00-04:00 2019-10-02T11:30:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (50+) Class / Instruction OLLI Study Groups
CSAS Summer in South Asia Fellowship Symposium (October 4, 2019 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/65322 65322-16571516@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 4, 2019 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

Ten undergraduate students were selected to be 2019 Summer in South Asia Fellows. Fellows designed, implemented, and enacted their proposals for their summers in India. At the symposium, students will share their experiences in India, drawing from their internships, research, and interactions with the culture.

Meet the fellows here: sisa.ii.lsa.umich.edu/

The symposium will be followed by a reception.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Conference / Symposium Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:38:01 -0400 2019-10-04T16:30:00-04:00 2019-10-04T19:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Conference / Symposium CSAS Summer in South Asia Fellowship Symposium
Strengthening Democracy: corruption and the water crisis in India (October 4, 2019 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/67827 67827-16958324@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 4, 2019 6:00pm
Location: Dana Natural Resources Building
Organized By: Association for India's Development - Ann Arbor

Jayaram Venkatesan is the cofounder of Arappor Iyakkam (Tamil for "People's association for non-violent struggle"), a citizens movement in Tamil Nadu, India.

Jayaram will be discussing Arappor’s fight against corruption and the recent Chennai water crisis.

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Presentation Tue, 01 Oct 2019 09:02:39 -0400 2019-10-04T18:00:00-04:00 2019-10-04T19:00:00-04:00 Dana Natural Resources Building Association for India's Development - Ann Arbor Presentation DANA 1024, 6-7pm
CWPS Faculty Lecture | Nachiket Chanchani (October 8, 2019 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/67913 67913-16966887@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 8, 2019 6:00pm
Location: East Quadrangle
Organized By: Center for World Performance Studies

Tuesday, October 8, 2019
6:00pm-7:30pm
East Quad Keene Theater
Free & Open to the public

Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, this talk will explore how B.K.S.Iyengar, (1918-2014) widely acclaimed as a man instrumental in bringing postural yoga to the West, came to understand yoga as an art and see himself as an artist.

The Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features our Faculty Fellows and visiting scholars and practitioners in the fields of ethnography and performance. Designed to create an informal and intimate setting for intellectual exchange among students, scholars, and the community, faculty are invited to present their work in an interactive and performative fashion.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact the Center for World Performance Studies, at 734-936-2777. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the University to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 02 Oct 2019 09:23:20 -0400 2019-10-08T18:00:00-04:00 2019-10-08T19:30:00-04:00 East Quadrangle Center for World Performance Studies Lecture / Discussion Photo credit: ©RIMYI Archives, Pune.
CGIS Study Abroad Fair (October 10, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/64876 64876-16483057@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 10, 2019 12:00pm
Location: Michigan League
Organized By: Center for Global and Intercultural Study

Learn about 140 programs in over 50 countries, ask about U-M faculty-led programs, and figure out which program can help satisfy your major/minor requirements. CGIS has programs ranging from 3 weeks to an academic year! Meet with CGIS advisors, staff from the Office of Financial Aid and the LSA Scholarship Office, CGIS
Alumni, and other on-campus offices who can help you select a program that works best for you.

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Fair / Festival Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:41:18 -0400 2019-10-10T12:00:00-04:00 2019-10-10T16:00:00-04:00 Michigan League Center for Global and Intercultural Study Fair / Festival PHOTO
CSAS Lecture Series | Of Commodities and Frontiers: Looking for "Capitalism" on the Edges of Britain’s Indian Colonies (October 11, 2019 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/64847 64847-16460999@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 11, 2019 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

In a longer project called The Postcolonial Commons, I am interested in the emergence of fluid political subjectivities around questions of defending existing commons, and creating new ones, in two regions of India: of small-scale fishers in coastal Kerala, and small farmers in the Garhwal region of present-day Uttarakhand state. I am in conversation with strands of contemporary political theory (represented, among others, by Hardt and Negri, Federici, de Angelis, Zizek, and Bauwens) that posit a future organised around ‘the commons’. However, while these writings are futuristic, I suggest that they have an underpinning narrative of the transition from the ‘pre-capitalist commons’ to the ‘commons unmade through capitalism’, which has implications for the political imaginaries outlined in their works. I challenge their orthodox account of this transition with drawing on writings on ‘postcolonial capitalism’, including my own recent work.

For this seminar, I offer two sections of the ‘historical’ part of the larger project: a discussion of the historiographical challenges in reconstructing ‘the pre-capitalist commons’ and the transitions it undergoes ‘under capitalism’ in relation to Kerala fisheries and Garhwali forests, and the limits of the ‘commodity frontiers’ approach to narrate this process. Among other things, the very nature of ‘rule’, and the problems of establishing it in these ‘unruly’ spaces, has a bearing on the sources – rather, the lack thereof – on which an account of such a process can be reconstituted. Accounts are few, and the reliability of some sources is uncertain, for much of the period of early colonial conquest. And what accounts there are do not point to the transformation of fish or forest into ‘commodities’ until relatively recently. Nor are capitalist production relations visible in any meaningful sense. The conditions for fish and forests becoming ‘commodities’, and for the emergence of capitalism in these sectors, come from a number of scientific, technological and other governmental innovations under late-colonial and early-postcolonial developmentalism. I conclude by identifying the implications of my account for radical political theory of the commons.

Subir Sinha studied History at the University of Delhi (BA) and Political Science at Northwestern University (MS, PhD), and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Vermont. His research interests are institutional change, sustainable development, social movements, state-society relations in development, and South Asian politics, with a current focus on decentralised development in India, early postcolonial planning, and on the global fishworkers' movement.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 02 Aug 2019 16:10:07 -0400 2019-10-11T16:30:00-04:00 2019-10-11T18:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Subir Sinha, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
Dismantling Casteism & Racism: Symposium (October 12, 2019 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/63434 63434-15694221@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, October 12, 2019 10:00am
Location: Michigan League
Organized By: Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies

Please note registering for this event is now closed.

The Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies (A/PIA) Program at the University of Michigan & the Ambedkar Association of North America have co-organized a symposium to address the theme “Dismantling Casteism and Racism.” The symposium will examine the contemporary and historical intersections between anti-racist and anti-caste struggles in South Asia and the U.S.

Vandenberg Room
Michigan League, 911 N. University, Ann Arbor
Light lunch will be provided
Saturday: October 12, 2019

Featured Speakers
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, Ph.D. is an award-winning scholar, political theorist, and one of the most prominent anti-caste activists and intellectuals in India. He is currently the director of the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Maulana Azad National Urdu University. Prof. Shepherd’s most recent publications include Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in Our Times (with co-writer Durgabai Vyam, 2007) and a memoir titled From a Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual (2019).

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a U.S.-based filmmaker, transmedia artist, and Dalit rights activist. She is the founder of Equality Labs, an organization that uses community research, socially engaged art, and technology to end the oppression of caste apartheid, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. In 2015, Soundararajan was was a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation fellow, during which time she helped curate #DalitWomenFight, a transmedia project and activist movement.

Ronald E. Hall, Ph.D. is Professor of Social Work at Michigan State University. His research specializations includes a focus on intraracial racism, colorism, caste, and mental health. His publications include The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans (edited), and The Scientific Fallacy and Political Misuse of the Concept of Race.

Ankita Nikalje is a Doctoral Student in the Counseling Psychology program at the College of Education at Purdue. Her research focuses on the continued psychological impacts of colonization in South Asian populations, and seeks to understand how historical oppression and current experiences of racism impact mental and physical health.

Gaurav Pathania, Ph.D. is a sociologist and currently teaches at The George Washington University at Washington DC. His current project explores Dalits and Black activism in the US. In 2018, he published his first book, The University as a Site of Resistance: Identity and Student Politics" with Oxford University Press.


Panel Moderator
Manan Desai, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies and the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. He also serves on the academic council of the South Asian American Digital Archive.


Co-sponsored by the Department of American Culture, Department of Asian Languages & Cultures, Center for South Asian Studies, Barger Leadership Program, Department of History, Department of English Language & Literature, and Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Community sponsorship from Periyar Ambedkar Study Circle, Association for India’s Development, and American Federation of Muslims of Indian Origin.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 11 Oct 2019 09:40:33 -0400 2019-10-12T10:00:00-04:00 2019-10-12T15:00:00-04:00 Michigan League Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Lecture / Discussion Poster
Meditation and Spiritual Life (October 14, 2019 6:15pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/68342 68342-17054451@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 14, 2019 6:15pm
Location: Pierpont Commons
Organized By: Vedanta Study Circle at University of Michigan

Swami Yogatmananda of Vedanta Society of Providence, RI would be giving a talk on 'Meditation and Spiritual Life'. All are welcome. This event is free of charge and RSVPs are not required.

About the speaker: Born in 1953 in Karnataka state (India), Swami Yogatmananda joined Ramakrishna Order in 1976. He received his monastic vows in 1986. After serving at Ramakrishna Math at Nagpur (Maharashtra state, India) for 20 years, he was posted as the Head of Ramakrishna Mission, Shillong, (Meghalaya state, India). He came to United States in the summer of 2001 as the Minister of the Vedanta Society of Providence.

Swami Yogatmananda’s present responsibilities include conducting Sunday service, weekly study classes and organizing spiritual retreats. He is invited to preach Vedanta at different places in the United States. He also serves as the Hindu Religious Affiliate at the Brown University, Providence, RI and the Hindu Chaplain at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, MA.

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Lecture / Discussion Sat, 12 Oct 2019 18:02:46 -0400 2019-10-14T18:15:00-04:00 2019-10-14T19:30:00-04:00 Pierpont Commons Vedanta Study Circle at University of Michigan Lecture / Discussion Swami Yogatmananda_Flier
Vedanta Discourse (October 14, 2019 6:15pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/68069 68069-16994910@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 14, 2019 6:15pm
Location: Pierpont Commons
Organized By: Vedanta Study Circle

We welcome you to attend Vedanta Discourse by Swami Yogatmananda, Minister in Charge, Vedanta Society of Providence, RI.

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Lecture / Discussion Sat, 05 Oct 2019 12:50:45 -0400 2019-10-14T18:15:00-04:00 2019-10-14T19:45:00-04:00 Pierpont Commons Vedanta Study Circle Lecture / Discussion October 14, 2019 talk by Swami Yogatmananda
WCED Lecture. The Authoritarian Origins of Dominant Parties in Democracies: Lessons from India (October 30, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/66331 66331-16727909@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 30, 2019 4:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies

What explains the electoral dominance of a single party over a prolonged period of time in a democracy? Focusing on the case of the Indian National Congress in India, Ziegfeld argues that authoritarian-era politics can influence the likelihood of single-party dominance after democratization. More specifically, when the authoritarian era's primary socio-political division becomes irrelevant because the democratization process roundly discredits one side of the division, the resulting party system in the democratic period is likely to feature a single major party and a host of small, disorganized, and inexperienced parties. Such asymmetric party competition is likely to produce a dominant party. This explanation accounts for the main features of Congress dominance in India, where the decolonization process discredited most of Congress' colonial-era competitors, leaving it to face a highly fragmented and disorganized opposition against which it could easily win elections. Ziegfeld concludes by reflecting on whether India is, today, on the cusp of a new dominant-party system under the BJP.

Adam Ziegfeld is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. He is the author of “Why Regional Parties? Clientelism, Elites, and the Indian Party System,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2016, as well as numerous articles on a range of topics related to political parties and elections.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at weisercenter@umich.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 27 Sep 2019 15:50:56 -0400 2019-10-30T16:00:00-04:00 2019-10-30T17:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Lecture / Discussion Adam Ziegfeld, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Temple University
CSAS Lecture Series | World Literature, the Global South and Indian Ocean Worlds (November 1, 2019 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/65095 65095-16517507@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 1, 2019 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

World Literature has emerged as a vital field in twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies, one that reflects on the place and function of literatures in our global era. Straddling the established fields of English and Comparative literatures, area studies, postcolonial studies and globalization studies, world literature urges new approaches across a comparative, multi-scalar, translational and inter-cultural space-time continuum; a continuum that poses a serious challenge to a one-world and totalizing model of literary production in our capitalist era. In this regard, both the ‘oceanic’ and the global south have emerged as powerful analytical frames. Oceans straddle traditional boundaries of nations, races, languages, literatures and cultures. The millennial-long history of the Indian Ocean, in particular, encompasses scales of contact that radically transform our grasp of the history of global capitalism entwining Euro-American and Afro-Asian worlds. This talk will focus on the resonance of Indian Ocean worlds to imagining the Global South as a cartographic frame in the post-Cold War era, and argue that the idea of world literature is unthinkable without this longue durée perspective.

Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. She works in the areas of world literature, postcolonial studies, the global Anglophone novel, Indian caste and dalit studies, Indian Ocean literary worlds, war and human rights, and technologies of violence. Her books include This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke 2016), Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge 2005), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (ed. 2007) and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality (ed.2007). She is currently working on two projects: a two-volume Cambridge History of World Literature (forthcoming 2020), and a monograph provisionally called Catastrophic Form: Drones, Toxins, Climate. Debjani is the General Editor of a new CUP book series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature and serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Institute for World Literature (IWL), the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), and the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (University of the Bologna). She has held visiting positions & fellowships at the University of Chicago (2010), University of Oxford (2012), University of Cambridge (2013), and University of Wisconsin Madison (2015).

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 18 Sep 2019 09:08:24 -0400 2019-11-01T16:30:00-04:00 2019-11-01T18:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Debjani Ganguly
UMMA Pop Up: Adam Kahana & Allie Taylor (November 2, 2019 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/69055 69055-17222095@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, November 2, 2019 1:00pm
Location: Museum of Art
Organized By: University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA)

A unique blend of Jazz, Rhythm & Blues, Soul, and much more are what make the music of singer/violinist Allie Taylor and guitarist Adam Kahana enticing. Allie Taylor (@allietay on Instagram), is a first year Graduate student at the University of Michigan, pursuing a Masters of Music in Violin Performance and a Masters of Music in Improvisation. Allie is a 3-time DownBeat Magazine Student Music Award winner (in the Jazz Vocal and Pop/Rock/Blues categories), a 2-time semifinalist in the Michael Feinstein Great American Songbook Initiative Competition, the first place winner of the Allegro Society Instrumental Scholarship Competition, and has performed internationally, from London to India (where she studied Carnatic violin for a summer). During her Undergraduate career at the University of Michigan, where she earned a B.M. in Violin Performance and a B.A. in Communications Studies, Allie interned with Askonas Holt, the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 

Adam Kahana is a composer (of both the planned and the spontaneous kinds) from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Born in Seattle, Washington, by way of Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin, he currently lives in Ann Arbor, where he studies jazz guitar, data science, and business at the University of Michigan. Adam (@AdamKahanaMusic on Facebook) recently placed as a jazz semi-finalist in the 2018 Wilson Center Guitar Festival Competition, an international multi-genre competition open to all guitar students. His quartet also placed as a finalist in the 2019 Detroit Jazz Festival Collegiate Combo Competition. 

In addition to giving guitar lessons in the area, Adam can be seen performing around town with his own groups, as well as with the acclaimed Ann Arbor Guitar Trio: annarborguitartrio.com.

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Performance Fri, 01 Nov 2019 18:17:01 -0400 2019-11-02T13:00:00-04:00 2019-11-02T14:00:00-04:00 Museum of Art University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) Performance Museum of Art
Unruly Figures, Vernacular Idioms: Politics of Sexuality in India (November 12, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/68964 68964-17203245@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 12, 2019 4:00pm
Location: Haven Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

This talk reflects on the key interventions of Navaneetha Mokkil’s recently published book Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala. Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures are produced in the public imagination and how these figures are accessed and deployed by marginalized sexual subjects, primarily the sex worker and the lesbian, as they stage their own fractured journeys of resistance in the post-1990s context of globalization. She argues that such intermedial and intertextual cultural traffic is the basis of a vernacular politics of sexuality.

By assembling and analyzing a Malayalam language archive, Mokkil demonstrates how vernacular formations of the politics of sexuality cannot be contained within scripts of visibility, rights, and recognition. Her explorations captures the need to revise politics in favor not of a set path but of one that holds within it different possibilities. Mourning and loss, failure, and rewriting are integral to such itinerant political topographies. This talk explores how we have to tactically reinvent categories of analysis so that we can engage with the unstable horizons of the
political.

Navaneetha Mokkil is an Assistant Professor at Center for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her areas of research and teaching include feminist politics in India, print and visual culture, and public formations of sexuality. She completed her PhD in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan in 2010. She is the author of Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala (2019, Seattle: University of Washington Press) and co- editor of Thinking Women: A Feminist Reader (2019, Kolkata: Stree Samya Publishers).

The events are generously sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies; the Colonialism, Race, and Sexualities Initiative (CSRI) of the Institute for Research on Women & Gender; the Department of English Language & Literature; and, the Department of Women's Studies.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 07 Nov 2019 09:52:34 -0500 2019-11-12T16:00:00-05:00 2019-11-12T17:30:00-05:00 Haven Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Unruly Figures, Vernacular Idioms: Politics of Sexuality in India
Why Asian Studies? (November 15, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/67445 67445-16855677@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 15, 2019 12:00pm
Location: 202 S. Thayer
Organized By: Asian Languages and Cultures

Current undergraduate students are invited to an information session on the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures major, minors, and language programs. Students will have the opportunity to speak with an advisor and ask questions specific to them. Representatives from Newnan Advising and CGIS will also be present!

The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures (ALC) is a center for the exploration of the humanities of Asia, where students are invited to cross the boundaries of nations and of disciplines in order to develop two vital qualities: a deep knowledge and a broad global perspective.

The department offers instruction in the cultures of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, and in many of the languages of Asia (including Bengali, Chinese, Filipino, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Thai, Tamil, Urdu, and Vietnamese).

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP at https://lsa.umich.edu/asian/undergraduates/informationsessions.html

We hope to see you there!

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Other Fri, 27 Sep 2019 11:21:03 -0400 2019-11-15T12:00:00-05:00 2019-11-15T13:00:00-05:00 202 S. Thayer Asian Languages and Cultures Other Info Session Flyer
CSAS Lecture Series | The Indian State that Fails and Delivers (November 22, 2019 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/65324 65324-16571517@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 22, 2019 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

Devesh Kapur, is the Starr Foundation South Asia Studies Professor and Director of Asia Programs at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. His research has focused on five broad areas that examine the political and institutional determinants of economic development: international financial institutions; political and economic consequences of international and internal migration; the effects of market forces and urbanization on the well-being of socially marginalized groups in India; governance and public institutions; and higher education. He is the coauthor of The World Bank: Its First Half Century; Public Institutions in India: Performance; and Design and Against the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs. His work on international migration examines the effects at a global level (Give us your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World); on the country of emigration (Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India) and the country of immigration (The Other One Percent: Indians in America, co-authored with Sanjoy Chakravorty and Nirvikar Singh). His recent books include Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education; Rethinking Public Institutions in India; The Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India and Regulation in India: Design, Capacity, Performance. Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, he held appointments at the Brookings Institution, Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania. He holds a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi; an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota; and a Ph.D. in public policy from Princeton.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 29 Oct 2019 16:16:42 -0400 2019-11-22T16:30:00-05:00 2019-11-22T18:00:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Devesh Kapur, Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies and Director of Asia Programs, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
EIHS Lecture: The Pen and a Sea of Pearls: Decolonizing Contemporary Historical Storytelling (December 5, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/63591 63591-15808572@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, December 5, 2019 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

A racist assumption powerfully shapes many history books today: the idea that European knowledge traditions and Enlightenment sciences are superior to the epistemologies of the peoples once colonized by European empires. In this lecture Professor Khatun will explore methodologies of historical storytelling that seek to decolonize contemporary knowledge production about the past. Reading Bengali-language narratives of popular history that have enjoyed oral dissemination throughout the Bengal delta and sometimes across an Indian Ocean realm, Professor Khatun will show that we can use colonized peoples’ historiographical traditions as keys that offer escape from the prison house of colonial-modern thought.

Dr. Samia Khatun is a writer, filmmaker and cultural historian whose documentaries have screened on national broadcasters SBS-TV and ABC-TV in Australia. She was born in Dhaka, educated in Sydney and has held research fellowships in Berlin, Dunedin, New York and Melbourne. Her first book, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia was published in December 2018 and was shortlisted for the Ernst Scott Prize for History. She is currently embarking on a new project about the spinners and weavers of eighteenth-century Dhaka. In September 2019, Samia will be taking up the position of Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Free and open to the public.

Presented in partnership with the Center for South Asian Studies. This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 02 Dec 2019 07:33:21 -0500 2019-12-05T16:00:00-05:00 2019-12-05T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Samia Khatun
Monuments and Public Art: A Public Conversation with Paul Farber (Monument Lab), Tina Olsen (UMMA), Srimoyee Mitra (Stamps Gallery) and Kristin Hass (Dept. of American Culture) (December 5, 2019 7:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/69699 69699-17384706@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, December 5, 2019 7:00pm
Location: Museum of Art
Organized By: University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA)

In celebration of the release of the new book on Philadelphia’s Monument Lab project, the U-M Center for World Performance Studies presents project co-founder and book co-editor​ Dr. Paul M. Farber​ to lead a public conversation about monuments and public art. Participants will be asked to interrogate the notion of what constitutes art in the public realm, address current controversies of public art and the future place of monuments, and consider the question of what kinds of monuments we need today.

Please note this event takes place at the U-M Hatcher Library Gallery at 913 S. University Avenue in Ann Arbor.  

Paul M. Farber​ is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art and Space at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Farber earned a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan and is a former graduate resident of the Center for World Performance Studies. He is the author of ​A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall ​(University of North Carolina Press, 2020) which tells the untold story of a group of American artists and writers (Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde) who found refuge along the Berlin Wall and in Cold War Germany in order to confront political divisions back home in the United States. He is also the co-editor with Ken Lum of ​Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia​ (Temple University Press, 2019), a public art and history handbook and catalogue designed to generate new critical ways of thinking about and building monuments.

Kristin Ann Hass​ is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Culture and the Faculty Coordinator of the Humanities Collaboratory at the University of Michigan. She has written two books, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall,​ a study of militarism, race, war memorials and U.S. nationalism and ​Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,​ an exploration of public memorial practices, material culture studies and the legacies of the Vietnam War. Her next book, ​Taking the Price of Freedom Seriously​, takes up the twentieth century public investment in and narratives about US militarism and nationalism in memorial Washington, DC and beyond. She lectures, teaches, and writes about nationalism, memory, publics, memorialization, militarization, visual culture and material culture studies. She holds a Ph.D. in American studies and has worked in a number of historical museums, including the National Museum of American History. She was also the co-founder and Associate Director of ​Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life​, a national consortium of educators and activists dedicated to campus-community collaborations.

Christina Olsen​ is the Director, University of Michigan Museum of Art. In a career spanning more than two decades, Christina has curated and produced groundbreaking exhibitions and initiatives, including ​Shine a Light​, an acclaimed annual museum-wide exhibition and event in Portland, Oregon; ​Object Stories​, an installation, audience, participation, and outreach initiative in 2010; ​WALLS​, a student art loan program at Williams College, and ​Accession Number,​ an exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art. In earlier posts, she was an associate producer at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco; curator of ​Art Access​, one of the first digital museum collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum; and a program officer at the Getty Foundation, where she managed the Foundation’s $4M in global grants for museum-based research and interpretation. Christina earned a bachelor’s degree in history of art from the University of Chicago, and a master’s degree and doctorate in art history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Srimoyee Mitra​ is the Director of the Stamps Gallery at the Stamps School of Art and Design. She is a curator and writer whose work is invested in building empathy and mutual respect by bringing together meaningful and diverse works of art and design. She develops ambitious and socially relevant projects that mobilize the agency within creative practices and public audiences. Her research interests lie at the intersection of exhibition-making and participation, migration, globalization and decolonial aesthetics. Mitra has worked as an Arts Writer for publications in India such as ​Time Out Mumbai​ and ​Art India Magazine​. She was the Programming Co-ordinator of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (2008-2010) in Toronto, where her curatorial projects included ​Crossing Lines: An Intercultural Dialogue​ at the Glenhyrst Art Gallery, Brantford. In 2011, she was appointed the Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Windsor, where she developed an award-winning curatorial and publications program.

This program is organized by the U-M Center for World Performance Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art, the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design; and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

For more information, please contact the Center for World Performance Studies.

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Lecture / Discussion Sun, 01 Dec 2019 18:16:56 -0500 2019-12-05T19:00:00-05:00 2019-12-05T20:30:00-05:00 Museum of Art University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) Lecture / Discussion Museum of Art
CSAS Lecture Series | Managing Migrants: Class and Emigration from India (January 17, 2020 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70019 70019-17497474@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 17, 2020 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

Professor Agarwala is the author of the award winning book,* Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2013). She is the author of numerous articles and volumes on class, gender and the state in India. She has also been engaged in multiple collaborative research projects on labor and social movements.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins University, she worked on international development and gender issues at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in China, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, and Women’s World Banking (WWB) in New York.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 16 Jan 2020 09:25:38 -0500 2020-01-17T16:30:00-05:00 2020-01-17T18:00:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Weiser Hall
Stone Sound Collective (February 7, 2020 8:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/71110 71110-17777075@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 7, 2020 8:00pm
Location: East Quadrangle
Organized By: Center for World Performance Studies

Stone Sound Collective unites diverse musicians and instruments to create a new global soundscape. Led by multi-percussionist Mark Stone, the group brings together celebrated world percussion traditions of Africa and India with the lyricism of cello and saxophone. Stone Sound Collective performs new music drawing on Mark's wide-ranging compositional influences, stretching from American jazz to traditional African music and classical Indian music to European concert music.

Prof. Mark Stone is a composer-performer with a passion for using music to bring diverse communities together. An internationally recognized multi-percussionist, Stone has performed with the foremost musicians of Uganda, Ghana, South Africa, India, Trinidad, Ecuador, and the United States. In the group, Stone plays the newly-invented array mbira, an American-made 120 key lamellaphone and a wide range of traditional melodic African instruments, including the Ghanaian gyil, Ugandan akogo, and South African karimba. He is joined by Matt Dufresne (saxophones, flute, atenteben, and nadaswaram), Abigail Alwin (cello), Chinelo Amen-Ra (djembe, congas, and cajon) and Sam Jeyasingham (mridangam, tabla, kanjira, thavil, and morsing). These established artists freely cross musical boundaries with their dynamic playing and are exceptional improvisers, bringing a wide-range of performance experience and artistry to the Stone Sound Collective.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact the Center for World Performance Studies at 734-936-2777. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the University to arrange.

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Performance Wed, 08 Jan 2020 13:16:00 -0500 2020-02-07T20:00:00-05:00 2020-02-07T22:00:00-05:00 East Quadrangle Center for World Performance Studies Performance Stone Sound Collective
Chaat Night With Project RISHI (February 11, 2020 8:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/72546 72546-18037798@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 11, 2020 8:30pm
Location: Mason Hall
Organized By: Project RISHI

Come join Project RISHI as we admire Indian cuisine in the form of CHAAT! Chaat is a famous street food dish that is served all around India. The money from this fundraiser will go towards social impact and helping rural villages. This event will take place on Tuesday February 11th from 8:30- 9:30pm at 3353 Mason Hall. The entrance fee will be $3! All are welcome to join!

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Social / Informal Gathering Fri, 07 Feb 2020 18:42:18 -0500 2020-02-11T20:30:00-05:00 2020-02-11T21:30:00-05:00 Mason Hall Project RISHI Social / Informal Gathering Come join Project RISHI at their Chaat night on Tuesday February 11th from 8:30- 9:30pm at 3353 Mason Hall!
STS Speaker. ToxiCity: Practices of Living Anthropogenic Seas (February 17, 2020 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70127 70127-17538845@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 17, 2020 4:00pm
Location: North Quad
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

How might we think about and address the kinds of life that emerge in the wastescapes of cities? In this talk I attend to the social and natural life of Mumbai’s anthropogenic sea. Today, Mumbai’s sea is an uneasy gathering of urban, climactic and agrarian processes. As sewage, fish, birds, coral, and algae interact in dynamic relations, how are fishers, amateur naturalists and scientists negotiating the ambivalent ecologies of the Anthroposea. By attending to their practices, this talk explores emergent ways of thinking, knowing and acting in muddy waters.

Bio: Nikhil Anand is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His award winning book, Hydraulic City, focuses on the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure in Mumbai. With Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta, Dr. Anand is also co-editor of The Promise of Infrastructure, which focuses on how infrastructure provides a generative ground to theorize time and politics. Dr. Anand's new research project, The Urban Sea, attends to the ways coastal cities are actively constituted through social and natural relationships with the sea. Dr. Anand has a Masters in Environmental Science from Yale University and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 04 Feb 2020 09:23:21 -0500 2020-02-17T16:00:00-05:00 2020-02-17T17:30:00-05:00 North Quad Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof. Nikhil Anand
CSAS Film Series | Swimming Through the Darkness (February 19, 2020 6:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70997 70997-17766497@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 19, 2020 6:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

Born in poverty and visually challenged, Kanai Chakraborty chooses the life of a swimmer. However, his success in the sport doesn’t ensure a steady income. Even at the age of 40, he has to continue swimming to make ends meet. He participates in the world’s longest swimming competition, traversing 81 km on the Ganges. His success brings in temporary glory, but his uncanny knack for chasing uncertainty remains constant.

Supriyo Sen’s filmography includes the documentaries Wait Until Death, Way Back Home, Hope Dies Last in War and Wagah. He has won 36 international awards for his films across the spectrum of international festivals. He has also won three National Awards including the President’s Gold Medal for the Best Documentary for Hope Dies Last in War.

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Film Screening Tue, 07 Jan 2020 09:50:05 -0500 2020-02-19T18:30:00-05:00 2020-02-19T20:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Film Screening CSAS Film Series | Swimming Through the Darkness
Language Fair (February 21, 2020 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/72306 72306-17972528@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 21, 2020 10:00am
Location: Michigan Union
Organized By: Asian Languages and Cultures

Are you interested in learning more about the Asian languages taught at the University of Michigan? The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures invites you to the Asian Languages Fair, featuring guests from the Chinese Language Program, Japanese Language Program, Korean Language Program, South Asian Language Program, and Southeast Asian Language Program.

You are invited to come learn about opportunities at UM to study the following languages: Bengali, Chinese, Filipino, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Thai, Tibetan, Urdu, and Vietnamese. There will also be opportunities to win raffle prizes.

The Asian Languages Fair will be held in the Pond Room of the Michigan Union from 10:00am-2:00pm on Friday, February 21. We hope to see you there!

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Fair / Festival Tue, 18 Feb 2020 09:36:48 -0500 2020-02-21T10:00:00-05:00 2020-02-21T14:00:00-05:00 Michigan Union Asian Languages and Cultures Fair / Festival Language Fair Digital Signage
Interdisciplinary Workshop in Comparative Politics (IWCP) (February 21, 2020 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70913 70913-17735218@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 21, 2020 1:00pm
Location: Haven Hall
Organized By: Interdisciplinary Workshop in Comparative Politics (IWCP)

The Interdisciplinary Workshop in Comparative Politics (IWCP) provides a platform for sharing and improving research that provides comparative perspectives on the causes and effects of political and economic processes. We have participants from Economics, the Ford School of Public Policy, the Law School, the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, Mathematics, Political Science, the Ross School of Business, Sociology, Statistics, and the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 07 Jan 2020 09:27:10 -0500 2020-02-21T13:00:00-05:00 2020-02-21T14:30:00-05:00 Haven Hall Interdisciplinary Workshop in Comparative Politics (IWCP) Lecture / Discussion Johannes Urpelainen
Talk: Meditation and Spiritual Life (March 8, 2020 6:15pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/73450 73450-18236950@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Sunday, March 8, 2020 6:15pm
Location: Michigan League
Organized By: Vedanta Study Circle at University of Michigan

Swami Yogatmananda of Vedanta Society of Providence would be coming to Ann Arbor on March 8 to deliver a talk on 'Meditation & Spiritual Life'. Key details are below.

Topic: Meditation & Spiritual Life

Speaker: Swami Yogatmananda (President of Vedanta Society of Providence, Hindi Religious Affiliate/Chaplain at Brown University and University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth)

About the speaker: Swami Yogatmananda is the current minister-in-charge of Vedanta Society of Providence. The swami was born in India and joined the Ramakrishna Order of monks in 1976 and received his monastic vows in 1986. He came to the US in the summer of 2001. Swami Yogatmananda’s present responsibilities include conducting Sunday services, weekly study classes and organizing spiritual retreats. He is invited to preach Vedanta at various places in the US. He also serves as the Hindu Religious Affiliate at Brown University, Providence and the Hindu Chaplain at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Date: March 08, 2020 (Sunday)

Time: 6:15 PM

Venue: Henderson Room,3rd Floor,Michigan League, 911 N University Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Contact: vedanta.a2@gmail.com

All are welcome. No RSVP necessary. Do not miss this opportunity.

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Lecture / Discussion Sun, 01 Mar 2020 18:31:19 -0500 2020-03-08T18:15:00-04:00 2020-03-08T19:30:00-04:00 Michigan League Vedanta Study Circle at University of Michigan Lecture / Discussion Event Flier
POSTPONED: South Meets North (March 13, 2020 6:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/73528 73528-18322368@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 13, 2020 6:30pm
Location: 1027 E. Huron Building
Organized By: SPIC MACAY at the University of Michigan

UPDATE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

SPICMACAY in collaboration with Jaya and Roger B. Natrajan present a Carnatic instrumental concert featuring Prof. Purnapragna Bangere on violin, accompanied by Amit Kavthekar on tabla.

Stay back after the concert for an interactive session with the artists and some insight into Prof. Bangere's geometric interpretation of music.

FREE ADMISSION!

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Performance Wed, 11 Mar 2020 14:15:18 -0400 2020-03-13T18:30:00-04:00 2020-03-13T20:30:00-04:00 1027 E. Huron Building SPIC MACAY at the University of Michigan Performance Poster for South meets North
CANCELED “Online Harassment and the Threat to Democracy” (March 24, 2020 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70106 70106-17532705@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 24, 2020 4:30pm
Location: Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Organized By: Wallace House Center for Journalists

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.

Online trolls are targeting journalists with such frequency and intensity that 90 percent of reporters say online harassment has become their biggest safety concern, according to a study by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The perpetrators range from lone-wolf digital stalkers to synchronized armies of online mercenaries set in motion by political actors. They have turned social media platforms into battlefields filled with verbal weaponry meant to intimidate and silence journalists. The threats toward female journalists are particularly vicious and dangerous. A recent study by the International Women Media Foundation found that online harassment has prompted many women journalists to consider leaving the profession.

What can be done to track and counter the hate?

Wallace House Presents a conversation with Rana Ayyub, award-winning investigative journalist based in Mumbai, Elodie Vialle, a Knight-Wallace Fellow and authority on internet harassment and attacks against female journalists and Jason Reich, Vice President of Corporate Security for The New York Times Company. Roya Ensafi, founder of Censored Planet and assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, will serve as moderator.

About the Speakers
Rana Ayyub is an award-winning investigative journalist based in Mumbai. A political writer and an important voice from South Asia, she is a Global Opinions contributor to the Washington Post. Her work has appeared in the The New York Times, Guardian and Foreign Policy among other publications. She has reported on religious violence, insurgency and extrajudicial killings by the state. She is author of the “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up,” an undercover investigation which exposes the complicity of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in state-sponsored killings. Time magazine this year listed her among ten global journalists facing the most urgent threats to their work, freedom and safety.

Elodie Vialle is a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she is studying methods and best practices for countering online attacks of female journalists. She was previously the Head of the Technology desk at Reporters without Borders. Her work focused on topics such as online censorship, surveillance, disinformation and the impact of artificial intelligence on freedom of information and internet governance. She has worked as an advisor for media outlets around the world, helping them to improve news coverage through the use of new technologies.

Jason Reich is Vice President of Corporate Security for The New York Times Company. He is responsible for the development and enforcement of all safety and security plans for employees and facilities while serving as the company’s internal expert on all security matters. He joined The Times from BuzzFeed, Inc. where he served as Director of Global Security since 2015. Prior to BuzzFeed, Jason was the founder and managing director of Collective Security Project, a team of crisis response experts, based in the United Kingdom, Turkey and the U.S., who were contracted to protect journalists, aid workers and N.G.O’s in challenging environments. Jason is a founding board member at the ACOS Alliance, and is a passionate advocate for freelance journalist safety worldwide.

Moderator: Roya Ensafi is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on security and privacy, with an emphasis on designing techniques and systems to protect users from adversarial networks. She founded and directs Censored Planet research lab at the University of Michigan that investigates different types of privacy and security violations on the internet.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:04:45 -0400 2020-03-24T16:30:00-04:00 2020-03-24T18:00:00-04:00 Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.) Wallace House Center for Journalists Lecture / Discussion Eisendrath Symposium
British Empire in India (March 27, 2020 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/70834 70834-17660822@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 27, 2020 10:00am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (50+)

In the year 1600, some British merchants sailed to Asia in search of fortune in trade and in the course of time they built “factories” in Indian coastal towns like Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta to expand trade. They were in competition with their fellow traders from Portugal, Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Sweden, who tried their own fortunes in India. They all got involved in the local political intrigue, but the British emerged as the preeminent power. 1757 saw the ascendancy of the British East India Company as the ruler of Bengal. Over the next one hundred years, the Company expanded its power over most of the Indian subcontinent by military conquest. A massive popular rebellion against the Company in 1857 was brutally crushed. The next year, the British Parliament dissolved the Company and took over the ruling of India, as a result of the uprising.
The 20th century saw two world wars and massive social, economic, and technological changes globally along with the rise of the independence movement in India. Britain ceded power in 1947 to two political entities, India and Pakistan. Instructor Lakshminarayanan will hold work groups on Fridays from March 27 through May 15 (no class on April 10).

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Class / Instruction Wed, 25 Dec 2019 16:07:52 -0500 2020-03-27T10:00:00-04:00 2020-03-27T12:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (50+) Class / Instruction OLLI Study Group
CANCELLED - CSAS Lecture Series | In Defense of Collateral Evidence: Refugees and Post-Partition IDs in Delhi (March 27, 2020 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/64844 64844-16460997@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 27, 2020 4:30pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for South Asian Studies

Unfortunately and due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled.

The Partition of India and Pakistan, which brought in its wake a sea of displaced populations, meant it was not merely refugees and their effects but equally the identity documents that were issued to them prior to migration that suffered from a sense of displacement. Given that the figure of the refugee was alien to the memory of the colonial state, it was hardly surprising that there were no pre-existing genres of recognizing her. With the exception of Calcutta, Delhi received a disproportionate number of refugees compared to other cities and urban authorities had to grapple with the absence of an infrastructure of enumerating and identifying them. In this city, various actors such as the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, housing agencies, the Delhi administration and refugee associations acted in concert to fortify the process of rehabilitation from the chaos of displaced identity documents. While an official identity document, termed the refugee registration certificate did emerge, it was unrealistic for authorities to undertake rehabilitation on the strength of the scarce possession of this document. Simultaneously, urban rehabilitation authorities refused to exempt (Dalit, upper caste Hindu and Sikh) refugee ‘squatters’ from encumbrances of submitting evidence of their caste, nationality, displacement, entry, occupation and presence in the planned city. Using several genres of primary historical sources, this paper inquires into how the Indian state went about knowing the refugee dwelling in urban spaces in ways that straddle the philosophical and the feasible, the material and the intangible. In particular, it asks the question, what role did refugee knowledge play in the fashioning of identity documents between 1947 and 1960? This paper must also be read in another register, namely, the popular making and not just the popular life of identity documents in marginal spaces of dwelling at an early hour of state formation.

Tarangini Sriraman is author of In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India published by OUP India. The book weaves together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents in the urban margins of India. She teaches Politics and History at the School of Liberal Studies in Azim Premji University, Bangalore. She has previously been a South Asia Program Fellow, Cornell University, Postdoctoral Fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi and Visiting Associate Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. She has also received the Charles Wallace Research Grant, London. Her work has been published in journals like Economic and Political Weekly, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 13 Mar 2020 10:50:05 -0400 2020-03-27T16:30:00-04:00 2020-03-27T18:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for South Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Tarangini Sriraman, Professor of Politics and History, Azim Premji University, India
The MIRS Advantage: Masters in International and Regional Studies (June 29, 2020 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/74975 74975-19118432@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, June 29, 2020 1:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: International Institute

Join MIRS advisor Charlie Polinko for an informational webinar for the Masters in International and Regional Studies Program. Charlie will present on topics related to the program structure, admissions requirements, funding and financial aid, specialization tracks, and dual-degree opportunities for students interested in applying for the Fall 2021 term. Registration is required at http://myumi.ch/v2jDR.

The Masters in International and Regional Studies combines an interdisciplinary curriculum, deep regional/thematic expertise, rigorous methodological training, and international experiences to enable students to situate global issues and challenges in their cultural, historical, geographical, political, and socioeconomic contexts and to approach them in diverse ways. MIRS is designed to prepare students for global career opportunities, whether in academia, private, or public sectors.

MIRS builds on the strengths of the International Institute’s interdisciplinary centers and programs. Our centers and programs rank among the nation’s finest in their respective fields of study; five have been designated as U.S. Department of Education National Resource Centers. Students have the unique option of pursuing either a regional or thematic track with multiple specializations anchored in one of our centers or programs.

Specializations include:
African Studies
Islamic Studies
Chinese Studies
Japanese Studies
Middle East and North African Studies
Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
South Asian Studies
Southeast Asian Studies

For additional information, contact MIRS-Info@umich.edu.

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Livestream / Virtual Wed, 17 Jun 2020 09:49:44 -0400 2020-06-29T13:00:00-04:00 2020-06-29T14:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location International Institute Livestream / Virtual MIRS Info Session
The MIRS Advantage: Masters in International and Regional Studies (July 28, 2020 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/74975 74975-19118433@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 1:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: International Institute

Join MIRS advisor Charlie Polinko for an informational webinar for the Masters in International and Regional Studies Program. Charlie will present on topics related to the program structure, admissions requirements, funding and financial aid, specialization tracks, and dual-degree opportunities for students interested in applying for the Fall 2021 term. Registration is required at http://myumi.ch/v2jDR.

The Masters in International and Regional Studies combines an interdisciplinary curriculum, deep regional/thematic expertise, rigorous methodological training, and international experiences to enable students to situate global issues and challenges in their cultural, historical, geographical, political, and socioeconomic contexts and to approach them in diverse ways. MIRS is designed to prepare students for global career opportunities, whether in academia, private, or public sectors.

MIRS builds on the strengths of the International Institute’s interdisciplinary centers and programs. Our centers and programs rank among the nation’s finest in their respective fields of study; five have been designated as U.S. Department of Education National Resource Centers. Students have the unique option of pursuing either a regional or thematic track with multiple specializations anchored in one of our centers or programs.

Specializations include:
African Studies
Islamic Studies
Chinese Studies
Japanese Studies
Middle East and North African Studies
Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
South Asian Studies
Southeast Asian Studies

For additional information, contact MIRS-Info@umich.edu.

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Livestream / Virtual Wed, 17 Jun 2020 09:49:44 -0400 2020-07-28T13:00:00-04:00 2020-07-28T14:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location International Institute Livestream / Virtual MIRS Info Session