Upcoming Events
Fall 2013 Soli Sorabjee Lecture -
"Ingesting Culture: Cooking, Colonialism, and the Construction of Indian-ness"
Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 5:00pm
Shapiro Admissions Center, Presentation Room
Speaker: Aruna D'Souza
Our fall 2013 lecture will be given by Dr. Aruna D'Souza - a writer, critic, and historian of modern and contemporary art with a particular interest in issues of feminism, post colonialism, and globalization, and a cultural critic who writes on food's relation to memory and trauma. She is currently finishing two projects: a book titled Open Secrets: Intimacy Between Street and Home, and a memoir-slash-cookbook, Kitchen Stories: Essays on Food, Love, and Loss. She is the author of Cézanne's Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint, and co-editor of the 2013 volume Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Her criticism has been published in Art in America, Bookforum, Time Out New York, and Art Margins, and her essays on contemporary feminist art and the archive, Lorna Simpson, Mona Hatoum, and others have appeared in catalogues for the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Musée de Beaux-Arts of Monaco.
Screening and Discussion with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra
Friday, October 11, 2013 at 3:00pm
Mandel G03Is piracy organized crime or class struggle? Is the fine line between plagiarism
and inspiration a copout or a whole other way of looking at the fluid nature of
authorship? Who owns a song—the person who made it or the person who paid
for it? Partners in Crime (2011), by Paromita Vohra, one of India’s most
acclaimed documentary filmmakers, tackles these questions and more.
Sponsored by the South Asian Studies Program and the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University.
The Female and Her Body in Pakistani Art
A Lecture by Sophiya Khwaja
Monday, November 4, 2013 at 2:00pm
Shiffman 219
In a social context in which women’s visibility has been culturally and historically undesirable, and, when visible, is considered a sexual invitation, the depiction of the female body assumes potent socio-political meaning, especially when enunciated by women themselves. This lecture will focus on the depiction of the female form in Pakistani art. Special emphasis will be given to work produced by contemporary women artists of the past decade living and working in Pakistan. The owning and celebration of the female body, the connotation to rebellion through its use in art along with the challenging of the “male gaze” are amongst the main concerns of the lecture. Also under consideration will be the development of the role of women in the arts, mainly through their use of the female form in their own work and the staggering influence this work has had on that produced by their male contemporaries. Sponsored by the Programs in South Asian Studies and the History of Ideas.
PAST EVENTS
- May 1, 2013: "Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Reflections on Loitering in Urban India," Speaker Dr. Shilpa Phadke (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai). Prof. Phadke discussed her research on gender and public space in relation to the recent nation-wide debates around sexual violence in India.
April 29, 2013: "Soldiering Sustainability: Urban Ecologies and Political Imaginaries in Kathmandu and Mumbai," Speaker: Dr. Anne Rademacher (NYU). In this talk, Dr. Rademacher drew from long-term ethnographic engagement with the biophysical, cultural, and political dynamics of urban river degradation in Nepal’s capital city to show how discussions of urban ecology in Kathmandu are at the center of competing political imaginaries. An open lecture to Anth151 "Nature, Culture, Power: Anthropology of the Environment." Co-sponsored with the Anthropology Department.
April 22, 2013: "Dhan Te Nan! Onomatopoeia and Other Deployments of Film Sound in Contemporary Multiplex Cinema," Speaker: Dr. Sudhir Mahadevan (University of Washington). This presentation offered a preliminary survey of the formal functions of film sound in contemporary multiplex cinema, as a potential gateway into reflections on South Asia’s cinematic imaginary. This event was associated with Eng20a "Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre & Society."
October 4, 2012: Renowned Indian filmmaker Anand Patwardhan '72 joined the Brandeis community for a screening of his film "Jai Bhim Comrade." President Lawrence welcomed Mr. Patwardhan to campus, describing his films as an invaluable contribution to social justice efforts across the globe and an inspiration to the Brandeis community.
March 23, 2011: Dr. Maina Chawla Singh (American University / New Delhi University) presented a lecture titled "Being Israeli: Migration, Ethnicity and Gender in the Jewish Homeland" based upon her scholarship "Writing Our Lives: Migration Narratives of Indian-Jewish Women".
April 13, 2011: Brandeis hosted a screening of the documentary "Made In India" about the 
human experiences behind the phenomena of "outsourcing" surrogate mothers to India.