The Third Annual Rutgers Conference on South Asia will take place in November, 2007. Anyone interested in helping to organize this conference should contact Nimanthi Rajasingham at nimanthi@eden.rutgers.edu.

New! Click here to view pictures from the 3rd Annual South Asian Studies Conference at Rutgers

South Asian Studies program and Mason Gross School of the Arts present Independent Curator & Art Critic - Gayatri Sinha.
Click here for more information.

Rutgers has launched a Bengali Language & Culture Initiative. For furthur information, please go to www.bengali.rutgers.edu.

SASP RESEARCH/TRAVEL AWARDS ANNOUNCED: Three students received awards for research-related activities this semester:

• Manjusha Nair, Department of Sociology, will conduct follow-up interviews and collect additional information for her research on ways in which the nation-building project was conducted in the city of Bhilai, India.
• Purba Rudra, Department of Geography, will conduct field work to advance her research on the globalization of health services and the rise of medical tourism in the case of India.
• Nimanthi Rajasingham, Department of English, will present a paper at the "Cultures of Violence" Conference organized at the University of California-Irvine in April 2007.

Congratulations to all these students, and good luck with their research!
Click here to see 2006 SASP Research/Travel Award winners.

South Asian Studies welcomes two new colleagues!

We are delighted to announce that two distinguished scholars of South Asia are joining the Departments of Geography and Anthropology at Rutgers from 2007.

Trevor Birkenholtz (PhD 2007, Geography, Ohio State University) is a cultural and political ecologist who studies the politics of access to and control over groundwater for irrigation and domestic uses in Rajasthan, India. He has been working since 2001 near the city of Jaipur in an attempt to understand the impact that tubewell/groundwater led agricultural development has on agrarian life. He is specifically, interested in the tensions between local and state forms of groundwater and irrigation expertise. The interaction of these often divergent but sometimes complementary environmental knowledges results in new forms of formal and informal groundwater management institutions, and also leads to recursive ecological change. Together, these processes inform the creation of formal state regulation of groundwater, which is now being considered.  He intends pursue these interests through ongoing research, while also expanding into the study of issues of water, equity and governance in South Asia’s urban areas.

Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2006. He also completed an M.A. in Ethnologie at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1998. He taught at Princeton in 2006, and held a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU in 2006-2007. Born in the divided former West-Berlin, he grew up in Germany, France, and Canada. He has completed field research on ethnicity, religion, and violence in Gibraltar, the United States, and India. He is currently completing a book on the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, India.

The South Asian Studies Program held a one-day festival of South Asian-American cinema on March 3, 2007 in Scott Hall on the College Avenue campus of Rutgers. Click here for details.