A partial listing of guest speakers

Fall 2011

Inderpal Grewal, Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Yale University

"IAS Memoirs:  Governance and Gender in India after Independence"

Tiffany Hodge, PhD Candidate in West and South Asian Religions, Emory University

"Norms and Narratives:  Locating Religious Orthodoxy in Rural Bangladesh"

Spring 2012

Barbara Metcalf, Professor Emerita of History, University of California, Davis

"Women's Development and Human Improvement: A Muslim Princess Writes a Book in 19^th Century India"

Kush Patel, PhD Candidate in Architecture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

"Communicating Space:  Framing Communication and Urbanism in Bombay"

Fall 2012

Wendy Doniger, Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago

"The Magic Ring of Memory and Forgetfulness in South Asian Literature and Folklore"

Barbara Ramusack, Professor Emerita of History, University of Cincinnati

"Infant Mortality, Subaltern Medical Women and Madras Municipal Politics after 1916"

Spring 2013

Davesh Soneji, Associate Professor of South Asian Religions, McGill University

"Performing Untenable Pasts:  Aesthetics and Selfhood in Kalavantula Communities of Coastal Andhra, India"

Gary Tubb, Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

"The Sanskrit Thesaurus and What it Can Tell Us"

Fall 2013

Navyug Gill, PhD Candidate in History, Emory University

"A Benevolent Rule?  Revenue and Politics of Measuring in Colonial Panjab"

Jonathan Walz, Assistant Professor in Anthropology, Rollins College

"Global India in Antiquity"

Spring 2014

Aftab Jassal, PhD Candidate in West and South Asian Religions, Emory University

"Encountering Krishna Face-to-Face:  Divination and Healing in Garhwal"

Allison Busch, Associate Professor of Hindi/Indian Literature, Columbia University

"Commemoration and Emotion:  Writing History in Early Modern Hindi"

Fall 2014

Cecilia Van Hollen, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Syracuse University

"Birth in the Age of AIDS:  Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India"

Spring 2015

Jenn Ortegren, PhD Candidate in Religion, Emory University

"Dharma, Class and Aspiration: The Shifting Religious Worlds of Urban Rajasthani Women"

Molly Emma Aitken, Associate Professor of Art History, City College of New York

"Love beyond Reach:  Mughal Paintings of Indian Heroines"

Phyllis Granoff, Lex Hinson Professor of World Religions, Yale University

"A Space for Tolerance: Responses to Other Religious Groups in Medieval Indian Literature"

Fall 2015

Phillip Wagoner, Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Weslayan University

"Using Money in Peninsular India, 14th - 17th Centuries"

Navina Haidar, Curator of Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700, Opulence and Fantasy"

Jonathan Loar, PhD Candidate in Religion, Emory University

"Encounters between Shirdi Sai Baba and Brahmims in Hagiographic Text and Film"

Spring 2016

V. Narayana Rao, Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History, MESAS Department, Emory University

and Harshita Kamath, Visiting Research Scholar in Religion, Middlebury College

"Translating across Culture: Challenges and Chances"

Francis Robinson, Professor of the History of South Asia, Royal Holloway, University of London

"How Maulana Jamal Mian became Pakistani"

Fall 2016

Bhrigupati Singh, Assistant Professor Anthropology, Brown University

"Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India"

Anne Murphy, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia

"Writing Punjabi across Borders"

Benjamin Cohen, Professor of History, University of Utah

"The Shape of Water in India's Deccan"

Spring 2017

Sonya Quintanilla, Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art, Cleveland Museum of Art

"Stories within Stories through Paintings from Mughal India"

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Distinguished Professor of History, University of California at Los Angeles

"In a Glass Darkly: Jesuit Advice for a Mughal Prince"

Fall 2017

Rabindranath Goswami and Ramchandra Pandit, Visiting Artists from India

"Hindustani Music Performance with Sitar and Tabla"

V. Narayana Rao, Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History, Emory University

and Scott Kugle, Professor of South Asian and Islamic Studies, Emory University

"Bhakti and Sufi Interactions in South Asia"

Regula Qureshi, Emeritus Professor, University of Alberta

"Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Feudal Ritual to Global Challenge"

Spring 2018

Philip Lutgendorf, Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies, University of Iowa

"Why is Rama Still (All) Around?"

Summar Shoaib, PhD Candidate in Religion, Emory University

"Modeling Exemplary Behavior: Womanhood and Performing Authority in a Sufi Transnational Organization"

Pak Midiyanto, University of California at Berkeley, Music Department

and James Hoesterey, Assistant Professor of Religion, Emory University

"Puppet Masters: Wayang Kulit and the Ramayana Epic in Indonesia"

Fall 2018

Robert Rozehnal, Associate Professor of Religion Studies, Lehigh University

"Cyber Sufis: Rebooting the Inayati Order in the Digital Age"

Stephen Dale, Emeritus Professor of History, Ohio State University

"Mughals not Mongols: Babur's Indian Empire"

Spring 2019

Anandi Knuppel, PhD Candidate in Religion, Emory University

"Beyond Seeing: Embodied Multisensory Performance, Experience and Practice
in Contemporary Transnational Gaudiya Vaishnavism"

Anand Venkatkrishnan, Preceptor in Sanskrit, Harvard University

"The Study of Sanskrit and the American Caste System"

Fall 2019

Anand V. Taneja, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University

"The (Critical) Edge of Tradition: Urdu Poetry and Political Theologies in Contemporary India"

Michael H. Fisher, Danforth Professor of History, Emeritus, Oberlin College

"Writing India's Environmental History"

Sita Sarah Muwahidah, PhD Candidate in Religion, Emory University

"Sectarianization in Indonesia: Orthodoxies, New Authorities, and Geopolitics"

Spring 2020

Chad M. Bauman, Professor of Religion, Butler University

"Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India: A Proxy War on Secular Modernity?"

Fall 2020

Isaac Foster, PhD Candidate in Islamic Civilizations Studies, Emory University

"The Flow of Cash in Sufi Ritual Music"

Ved Patel, PhD Candidate in Religion, Emory University

"Golden Bangles and Hungry Buffaloes: Remembering Seva after the 2001 Kutch Earthquake"

Spring 2021

John Guy, Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Early Indian Textile Trade to West Asia and its Indonesian Afterlife"

Aliyah Khan, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan

"Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean" (Co-sponsor)

Elizabeth Lambourn, Professor of Material Histories, De Montfort University

"Wondrous Worlds Connected: Life at the Sea in the Islamic World" (Co-sponsor)

Fall 2021

Aalekhya Malladi, PhD Candidate, Graduate Division of Religion, Emory University

"Offerings for the Debt Bound God: Exploring Sacred Space in Tirupati"

Scott Kugle, Professor of South Asian and Islamic Studies, Emory University

"Qawwali: Translating Islam into Love's Language"

Riyaaz Qawwali Performance

Paul Courtright, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Emory University

"Testimonies: Accounts of Sati in Colonial India"

Spring 2022

Kareem Khubchandani, Assistant Professor of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, Tufts University

"Lessons in Drag"

Conference "New Directions in Hindi Language Instruction"