Straddling Borders: How immigration and diaspora influence artistic production
October 10, 2024 - 12 p.m. Mandel Room 303
How does immigration and diaspora influence artistic practices and cultural production? How does it affect how creatives see the social role and the full possibilities of their creation? During this lunchtime talk, the Mandel Center will convene artists, writers and creatives who will discuss how immigration has influenced their work, and then open the discussion to how the Mandel Center and other centers at Brandeis can facilitate more global engagement. This event will be a part of MCH's Humanities for Global Affairs Working Group Series.
Panelists: Bulbul Chakraborty, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Marjan Kamali
Moderator: Esha Senchaudhuri
Bulbul Chakraborty
Bulbul Chakraborty is the Ancell Professor of Physics and the former Head of the Division of Sciences at Brandeis. As a condensed matter theorist, Bulbul has been obsessed, for the past decade, with creating a framework to describe the behavior of granular materials: how sand, for example, jams and flows, sometimes like a liquid, sometimes like a solid. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of a Simons Fellowship. Born in India, Bulbul grew up singing Rabindrasangeet: Rabindranath Tagore’s repertoire of songs about the natural world. She has been collaborating with her son, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, on an interdisciplinary performance project called Rheology, which will premiere this spring Off Broadway, at The Bushwick Starr. The piece, which Bulbul has been developing with Misha for four years, in residence at HERE Arts Center, weaves together her pursuits and passions as a physicist, a singer, and a mother. She has performed concert versions of the project at Lincoln Center and Little Island. An alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, Bulbul immigrated to the U.S. in 1974 to get her Ph.D from Stonybrook. She was the first tenured woman physicist at Brandeis. You are likely to find her singing loudly in her office.
Shayok Misha Chowdhury
Shayok Misha Chowdhury is the Obie and Whiting Award winning writer and director of Public Obscenities, one of three finalists for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The bilingual play, in Bangla and English, was a New York Times Critic's Pick and named Best Theater of 2023 and hailed as a “literary marvel” by the New Yorker. Misha is also the recipient of a Princess Grace Award, The Mark O’Donnell Prize, Drama Desk and Drama League nominations, a Jonathan Larson Grant, and the Relentless Award for his musical How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia, a collaboration with composer Laura Grill Jaye. Misha also collaborated on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns. A two-time Sundance Fellow, Misha is the creator of VICHITRA, a series of short films rooted in queer South Asian imagination. A Fulbright fellow, Misha’s poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hunger Mountain, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Asian American Literary Review and elsewhere. Misha was born in India, raised in Massachusetts, and lives now with his partner in Brooklyn. He received his B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford, under the mentorship of Cherríe Moraga, and his M.F.A. in Directing Theater from Columbia.
Marjan Kamali
Marjan Kamali is the award-winning author of The Lion Women of Tehran (out July 2024), The Stationery Shop (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), a national and international bestseller, and Together Tea (EccoBooks/HarperCollins), a Massachusetts Book Award finalist. She is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Marjan’s novels are published in translation in more than 25 languages (21 languages for The Stationery Shop and 10 languages for Together Tea). Her essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Literary Hub, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Marjan holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master of Business Administration from Columbia University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from New York University. Born in Turkey to Iranian parents, she spent her childhood in Turkey, Iran, Germany, Kenya, and the U.S. Marjan is currently the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. She lives in the Boston area with her family.
Esha Senchaudhuri
Esha Senchaudhuri is the Assistant Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities, where she leads the 'Humanities and Global Affairs' project area. As a policy fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Esha supported the National Commission on Language Learning and helped establish the National Commission on Arts. She also traveled with the Academy's Global Security team to NATO and the European Parliament to present her research on the protection of cultural heritage in war zones. This work was sponsored through an initiative of the Getty Trust. In 2022, Esha was also a subject matter contributor to the strategic re-alignment process of Americans for the Arts. Esha holds a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Ewconomics, an LLM in Comparative & Foreign Law from the University of London, and a law diploma from the University of London.