AIIS 2008 Junior Fellows Conference

AIIS 2008 Junior Fellows Conference

The American Institute of Indian Studies held its largest ever Junior Fellows’ Conference on January 7 and 8, 2008 at the AIIS center in Gurgaon. The Junior Fellows Conference brings together as many junior fellows—graduate students conducting research for their doctoral dissertations—as possible from all over India. This year twenty junior fellows participated in the conference. The conference was divided into four sessions during which fellows made their presentations, followed by questions and discussion. The first session on Social History was moderated by Professor Geraldine Forbes, of the Department of History at SUNY, Oswego and AIIS Treasurer. The second session, on Society and Development was moderated by Professor Ralph W. Nicholas of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and AIIS President. The third session, on Culture and Artistic Traditions, was moderated by Professor Stephen Slawek of the Department of Music at the University of Texas and Chair of the AIIS Ethnomusicology committee. The final session, on Textual Studies, was moderated by Professor Philip Lutgendorf, of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Iowa and the Chair of the AIIS Language Committee. The annual junior fellows conferences are funded by a grant from the Department of Education’s American Overseas Research Centers Program. The participants included:

Andrew Bauer, Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, “Social Differentiation and Land Use in Early South India.”

Emera Bridger, Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University, “Competing Developments: The Case of Keoladeo National Park.”

Elizabeth Bridges, Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, "Keladi-Ikkeri Nayaka Regional Authority Under the Vijayanagara Empire."

Nandini Chaturvedula, Department of History at Columbia University, “The Politics of Empire: Crisis and Conflict in Seventeenth Century Portuguese India.”

Shanna Dietz, Department of Political Science at Indiana University, “Globalization and Traditional Identity in Hyderabad.”

Oscar Figueroa Castro, Divinity School at the University of Chicago, “Pratibha--Poetic, Religious, Philosophical: On Imagination in the Tantric Mysticism of Abhinavagupta.”

Diana Finnegan, Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin, “Friendship in Buddhist Monasticism: Ethics in the Mulasarvastivadavinayavastu.”

George Fiske, Department of History at Columbia University, “The Ghaznavid Sultanate Between Iran and India.”

Julie Hughes, Department of History at the University of Texas, “Hunting Grounds: Landscape and Princely Pursuits in Colonial India.”

Justine Lemos, Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, “Women's Dance in Kerala: Creation, Maintenance and Transformation of Lasya.”

Mandavi Mehta, Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, “The Mouse Who Would Be King: Innovating Tradition in the State of Chamba.”

Constantine Nakassis, Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, "Romantic Love and College: an Ethnographic Discourse-Based Study in Tamil Nadu.”

Sudha Narayanan, Department of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University, “Choosing Farmers: Selection and Screening Mechanisms in Contract Farming Systems in India.”

Rahul Parson, Department of South and SE Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, “Contemporary Hindi Literature in Kolkata's Marwari Community."

Matthew Rahaim, Music Department at the University of California, Berkeley, “Gesture in Hindustani Vocal Music.”

Malini Ranganathan, Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, “The Politics of Infrastructure and Governance in a Globalizing Metropolis: A Study on Bangalore.”

Joshua Barton Scott, Religion Department at Duke University, “Divine Exposures: How Skeptics and Scandals Remade the Public Sphere in Colonial India.”

Llerena Searle, Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, “Building Consumerist Personhood in Delhi and Kolkata.”

Roy Tzohar, Department of Religion at Columbia University, “World of Yogacara: Sattva-bhajana-loka, Spectacle and Shared Illusion.”

Patrick Weston, Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, “Qawwals of Ajmer.”

American Institute of Indian Studies

Fellowship Competition

2009-2010

Deadline: 1 July 2008

The American Institute of Indian Studies is a cooperative, non-profit organization of fifty-four American colleges and universities that supports the advancement of knowledge and understanding of India, its people, and culture. Applications to conduct research in India may be made in the following categories:

Junior Research Fellowships . Available to doctoral candidates at U.S. universities in all fields of study. Junior Research Fellowships are specifically designed to enable doctoral candidates to pursue their dissertation research in India. Junior Research Fellows establish formal affiliation with Indian universities and Indian research supervisors. Awards are available for up to eleven months.

Senior Research Fellowships . Available to scholars who hold the Ph.D. or its equivalent. Senior Fellowships are designed to enable scholars in all disciplines who specialize in South Asia to pursue further research in India. Senior Fellows establish formal affiliation with an Indian institution. Short-term awards are available for up to four months. Long-term awards are available for six to nine months. A limited number of humanists will be granted fellowships paid in dollars funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Senior Scholarly/Professional Development Fellowships . Available to established scholars who have not previously specialized in Indian studies and to established professionals who have not previously worked or studied in India. Senior Scholarly/Professional Development Fellows are formally affiliated with an Indian institution. Awards may be granted for periods of six to nine months.

Senior Performing and Creative Arts Fellowships . Available to accomplished practitioners of the performing arts of India and creative artists who demonstrate that study in India would enhance their skills, develop their capabilities to teach or perform in the U.S., enhance American involvement with India’s artistic traditions, and strengthen their links with peers in India. Awards will normally be for periods of up to four months, although proposals for periods of up to nine months can be considered.

Non U.S. citizens are welcome to apply for AIIS fellowships as long as they are either graduate students or full-time faculty at a college or university in the U.S. Citizens of the United States, however, can apply for senior fellowships if they are not affiliated with an institution of higher education in the U.S. Fellowships for U.S. citizens are funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (also available to permanent residents); the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States State Department and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers under the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961, as amended; and the Smithsonian Institution. Some fellowships for non-U.S. citizens and artists can be funded from the AIIS Rupee Endowment in India. Fellowships for six months or more may include limited coverage for dependents.

For application and further information, please contact:
email:
www.indiastudies.org

AIIS Academic Year Language Program awarded a grant from the Department of Education

The American Institute of Indian Studies was recently notified by the Department of Education that it has been awarded a four-year grant to fund the AIIS academic year language program. This grant comes from the DOED’s Group Projects Abroad Program. The DOED has generously funded the AIIS academic year language program for a number of years. The amount awarded for the first year of the grant is substantially higher than in previous years, and will allow AIIS to provide full language fellowships to about twenty

students in 2008-2009. Thanks to Philip Lutgendorf, the Chair of the AIIS Language Committee, who worked so hard on this successful application.

AIIS BOOK PRIZE

In order to promote scholarship in South Asian Studies, the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) announces the award of two prizes each year for the best unpublished book manuscript on an Indian subject, one in the humanities, “The Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities” and one in the social sciences, “The Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences”. Indiana University Press has the right of first refusal for any prize-winner, with manuscripts being published in the Indiana University Press/AIIS series Contemporary Indian Studies (after revision and editing). Manuscripts that are accepted at other presses are not eligible. Only junior scholars who have received the PhD within the last eight years (2001 and after) and been awarded an AIIS Fellowship or participated in an AIIS program (fellowship or language) are eligible. A prize committee will determine the yearly winners and can choose to designate no winner in any given year if worthy submissions are lacking. When submitting manuscripts to the prize committee, applicants are committed to publication in the AIIS series with Indiana University Press if chosen as a winner. AIIS will provide a subvention to Indiana University Press for all prize manuscripts. Unrevised dissertations are not accepted. We expect that the applicants will have revised dissertations prior to submission. Manuscripts are due October 1st., with an announcement of the awardees at the made early in 2009. Send TWO copies of your manuscript, postmarked no later than October 1, 2008, to the Publications Committee Chair, Susan S. Wadley, Anthropology, 209 Maxwell, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244. Queries can be addressed to

2003 Winners:

Aseema Sinha, U of Wisconsin, Madison. The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan. March 2005.

Pika Ghosh, University of North Carolina. Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal. March 2005.

2004 Winners:

Deborah Hutton, College of New Jersey. Art of the Court of Bijapur.

Sondra Hausner, Research Advisor for Save the Children-US (Nepal) Wandering in Place: Body, Space, and Time for Hindu Renouncers

2006 Winners:

Lisa Mitchell, University of Notre Dame. The Making of a Mother Tongue: Language, Emotion, and Collective Identity in Colonial and Post-colonial Southern India

Mytheli Sreenivas, Ohio State University. Conjugality and Capital: Family and Colonial Modernity in Tamil India, 1880-1950

2007 Winners

Karline McLain, Bucknell University, Immortal Picture Stories: Comic Books, Religion, and Identity in Modern India

Michael Youngblood, Cultivating Communities: Identity, Ambiguity and the Construction of Common Interest in a Contemporary Indian Social Movement

AIIS is awarded the 2008 Taraknath Das Foundation Award

The American Institute of Indian Studies has been awarded the 2008 Tarknath Das Foundation Award for the AIIS contribution to “understanding between India and America.” Taraknath Das came to the United States as a poor student around 1905 from Calcutta. He started his foundation in the 1930s out of his concern with the difficulties of Indian students abroad. Among other endeavors, the foundation funds India-related activities at various universities in the United States, supports the Taraknath Das Research Centre at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, and awards grants to small non-profit organizations in India which are working for justice and equality. Furthermore, for more than twenty years the Taraknath Das Foundation has been giving an award to a person or institution that has contributed to understanding between India and America. AIIS President Ralph W. Nicholas will accept the award at a ceremony in New York on May 9.

News from AIIS fellows

Michael Peter Cain recently completed his AIIS performing/creative arts fellowship for his project, “Making Contemporary Sculpture inCollaboration with Repousse Artisans in India.” He reports that he has completed the initial stages of eighteen collaborative repousse sculptures,nine wax-modeled cast-brass sculptures, and three cast brass textsculptures fabricated with a Delhi sign maker. He created a variety of original relief embellishments by outliningpaper cutouts directly onto sculptural surfaces and by using AdobePhotoshop to deform patterns to conform to three-dimensional surfaces. Direct modeling in wax was also used as a means of exploring thesame themes as in his repousse collaborations. Professor Cain worked with new traditional artisans in Varanasi and inThimakudi, Tamil Nadu, with whom he discovered additional ways ofworking and also began to design sculptures made entirely from cast brassletters featuring texts inspired by Indian treatises on aesthetic rapture. In October-November of 2007, he participated in a five weekresidency at Khoj, an international contemporary artists' associationin Delhi.While there, he explored enhancing his ongoing sculptures with light andsound features and worked with Delhi engineer Gurdeep Singh to useLEDs to create all-over light fields as well special effects for foursculptures mounted on the four walls of gallery space.He workedbriefly with composer Lex Bhagat to install a sound field.From November 2007 to February, 2008 he lived and worked in anArtists' residency in Varanasi called Kriti. This facility provided a sizable studio in which he was able tohang sculptures on white walls and enabled him to preparesculptures from the first phase of his AIIS fellowship for exhibition. These sculptures were exhibited from February 7 to 13, 2008 in a double show withhis wife Charlotte Cain at The Attic in New Delhi. The show was introduced by the curator, gallery director, and artist, Peter Nagyand he gave an illustrated lecture on his sculptures there on February7th.

John Cort, Professor of Religious Studies at Denison University and currently an AIIS senior fellow, was the subject of an article that appeared in the Deccan Herald, entitled, “Abundant ‘bhakthi’ literature in Jainism, says professor.” The article reported on a talk that Professor Cort gave to a gathering at the sammilan program organized by the four Jain milans of the city of Mysore, in which he maintained that bhakthi literature relating to Jainism can be found abundantly in different languages of India.

Recent AIIS performing/creative arts fellow Timothy Hoffman performed in a Japan-India Friendship concert on January 31, 2008 in Visakhapatnam along with eight local Carnatic Musicians. The proceeds of the concert, will go to support HIV/AIDS and gerontology research and India’s largest mentally handicapped facility Lebenshilfe India, where Mr. Hoffman has worked as a volunteer music therapist. Mr. Hoffman and his colleagues gave a performance of Indian classical music with the use of Japanese musical instruments. A report on the concert appeared in the newspaper The Hindu on February 2. According to the newspaper article “using the stringed instrument ‘koto’ (a Japanese musical instrument) he rendered ragas from Hindustani classical music with all the appropriate nuances. He played the veena, the santoor and the violin on the simple instrument to produce authentic tunes. He also gave a delightful performance on the Japanese vertical bamboo flute shakuhachi while elaborating on the subtle nuances of India.”