Dear Friends,
 
ISAS faculty and students continue to win awards for path-breaking scholarship, teaching, and service. We are exceedingly proud to share that our 2015 Chowdhury Center Fellow on Quality of Life in Bangladesh, Yoshika Crider (ERG) has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her groundbreaking work on safe water technologies for rural and low income Bangladesh. This is a wonderful achievement as she was one of 2000 awardees selected from an applicant pool of 17,000 this year. Read more about the program here. 

We are also happy to announce that Sayah Bogor (MPH Candidate, Infectious Diseases) and Laura Boudreau (Ph.D Candidate, Business & Public Policy) have been awarded the 2016 Chowdhury Center Fellowships on Bangladesh Studies. Sayah, awarded the Subir Chowdhury Fellowship on Quality of Life in Bangladesh, works on the effect of antibiotic treatments on urinary tract infection (UTI) in women in Bangladesh and Laura, awarded the Malini Chowdhury Fellowship on Bangladesh Studies, works on Bangladesh’s RMG sector.

And finally, we are delighted to announce that Professor of Sanskrit,  Prof. Robert Goldman (South & Southeast Asian Studies) has been awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award for 2016 by the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association. Nominations for this award are made anonymously and recipients, who must be associated with Mills College, SF State University, Santa Clara University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, or UC Davis, are celebrated at an award ceremony followed by award dinner in Berkeley on May 7, 2016. 

Our heartiest congratulations to all award winners! 

We have many exciting events planned for the remainder of Spring 2016. We kick off the month on April 4 with Sewing Power: Labor Rights in the Garment Industry in South Asia, a half-day symposium focusing on labor rights in the garment industry in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka followed by a screening of The True Cost, a feature length documentary that explores the impact of fashion on people and the planet.

Please join us on April 9, at the award ceremony for the S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies. The winner for 2016, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs will give a talk on his award-winning dissertation, The West is a Career: Pakistan's Shi'i Islam between the local and the transnational.

Celebrating undergraduate and graduate research work are two events: An Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 21 highlighting UC Berkeley undergraduate scholarship on cultural, political, and religious norms in South Asia. And the fifth annual graduate student conference South Asia by the Bay, entitled Indian Oceanic Topographies, Contemporary Worlds, and Situated Practices on April 22 and 23 in UC Davis.

Other highlights in April include talks by Journalist Somini Sengupta (April 7); UC Davis Professor of History Ali Anooshahr (April 14); UCLA Professor of Gender Studies Purnima Mankekar (April 18); Industrialist Rubana Huq (April 25); and Pakistan's Ambassador to the US, Ambassador Jalil Abbas Jilani (April 26);

Sanjay Srivastava, Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, will give a lecture titled, 'Violent Castes’, ‘Left Wing Extremists’ and Mall Workers: Rethinking 'Emotional Labour' and ‘Neo-liberalism’ in the Context of New Labour on May 2.

Finally, we wrap up the semester with multiple performances of Wajahat Ali's award winning drama, The Domestic Crusaders by the Bay Area Drama Company. 

Please scroll down for a detailed list of the remaining Spring 2016 events. 

Our Viewpoint section includes a new article: State vs Feminist: The targeting of Nivedita Menon by the Indian right wing by Vasundhara Sirnate.

For those of you who were not able to attend our March events, please know that all ISAS events are video recorded and made available for viewing on our website. Newly added are:

• It's all about loving your Nation: Sedition and the surplus of Affection, the 5th Maharaj Kaul Memorial Lecture by Lawrence Liang
• Akkai Padmashali, a transgender activist who advocates for gender and sexual minorities, talk titled "Prejudice, Transphobia, and Homophobia in 21st Century India"
• Multiple Temporalities: South Asian Historiography and Its Transcultural Implications, a talk by Dr. Axel Michaels, Professor for Classical Indology, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University.
• Ecoaesthetics: Water in an Expanded Field, New Delhi-based contemporary artist, Atul Bhalla discussing the politics and aesthetics of water with Lauren Kroiz (History of Art), Robert Goldman (Sanskrit), and Sugata Ray (History of Art). 

Our conference on assessing the state of education, law and rights, business and technology, poverty and service distribution, religion and culture and India under 2-years of BJP rule, held last month, went off exceedingly well. An extraordinary group of journalists and public intellectuals, economists, engineers and business leaders, lawyers and activists, and representatives of debate across the political spectrum in India today came together for two days in Berkeley to participate in what became lively and thought provoking discussions. Read India West's coverage on it here. Videos of the talks as well as Pratap Bhanu Mehta's keynote will be made available as soon as they are ready. 

The Chowdhury Center Distinguished lecture for 2016 with the truly amazing Amartya Sen and the ever gracious Pranab Bardhan was a tremendous success. It was an evening filled with delightful anecdotes, stories, and academic discussions about Bangladesh, South Asia, and South Asians. Event photos taken by Prasenjit Sengupta may be viewed here. The video of the talk is forthcoming on the same page.  

We look forward to seeing you at our events! 

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April 2016 Events