Recently, South Asia Center graduate assistant Karishma Manglani interviewed Sangram Majumdar, who joined the University of Washington in 2021 as an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing. Prior to this, Professor Majumdar taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art for eighteen years. Read on to learn more about Professor Majumdar’s artistic influences growing up in Kolkata,

On Friday April 22nd, 2022, the South Asia Center convened its first in-person event in over two years: a discussion with Shobha Rao, author of An Unrestored Woman and the novel Girls Burn Brighter, facilitated by UW-Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Associate Teaching Professor Alka Kurian. The discussion centered on themes of gender politics in South Asia and

On Thursday, March 10th, 2022, Debashree Mukherjee presented a lecture on research from her new book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020). Her work focuses on the origins of Bombay Cinema in the 1930s, a period of great uncertainty in the life of the city, much different than the brash commercial

South Asia Center graduate student assistant Karishma Manglani recently spoke with JSIS South Asia Studies MA alum Rachel Heilman, a social studies teacher at Issaquah High School. With the support of the South Asia Center’s National Resource Center grant and guidance from Sunila Kale (Associate Professor of International Studies), Heilman designed a new high school

South Asia Center graduate student assistant Shelby House recently spoke with alumna Thilini Kahandawaarachchi, JSIS South Asia Studies MA (2015). A former lawyer and Fulbright student at UW, Kahandawaarachchi now works as a Senior Political Adviser at the Norwegian Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Read more about her writing, research, and career below. SH: What led

The South Asia Center is saddened to announce that Emeritus Professor Karl Potter has passed away. The Department of Philosophy shared the following remembrance: Karl joined the Department of Philosophy and the Far Eastern and Russian Institute in 1970, then associated with South Asian Studies. He served as chair of the department from 1986-90 and

On January 26th, Professor Anand Yang (International Studies and History) presented a lecture entitled “Commodities and Capitalism: A Tale of Tea in China and India,” as part of the History Department’s 2022 History Lecture Series, Capitalism in Action: Culture, Power, History. In the lecture, Yang presents a history of capitalism in China and India narrated through the study

Jackson School Professor Christian Lee Novetzke has received a prestigious fellowship from the National Endowment Humanities (NEH) 2022 for his new book project titled, “A Flower of Fire: Religion, Caste, and Gender in the Political Poetry of Savitribai Phule (1831–1897).” The book on Savitribai Phule, a “low-caste” or Shudra social reformer of the 19th century, will explore

On January 7, 2022, anthropologist Tarini Bedi (University of Illinois at Chicago) presented a lecture via Zoom on “Indian Automobility and Auto-Space in Urban India: Whose Road is it Anyway?” Drawn from her recent book Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India (University of Washington Press), Bedi’s talk explored “Indian automobility” through the lens of