Pratibha Jena Singh is the leading exponent of the particular style of Odissi (Indian classical dance from the state of Orissa) developed by her late father, Guru S.N. Jena. She received the "Shringari Shyamsunder Award" for Odissi in 1995. Her distinguished performing career has spanned three decades and has included solo appearances at some very prestigious dance eventes organized by institutions such as Sangeet Natak Akademi, India International Center, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, India Tourism Development Corporation and Doordarshan Kendra. Since 1990 she has served as full-time teacher of Odissi at Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi. This is her first trip to the USA and while here she is scheduled to perform in Knoxville & Lenoir City TN; Asheville and Hendersonville NC; Macon, Milledgevill and Athens GA; Boston MA; Yonkers NY and San Francisco CA.
Felicitas Becker is Assistant Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. I have no family connection to Africa and had never been there before I took up African history. It was the apparent contrasts between Europe and Africa ( which after all is just next door) that got me interested. I wanted to see what's behind the notion of Africa as the continent without history and the failure of the modern era, and maybe deflate the grand ideas of Europe which this view of Africa serves to underscore. Experience has since taught me to disregard these dichotomies as far as possible. As an undergraduate I studied at Humboldt University, Berlin, and then did my graduate work at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, and Cambridge University (from where I obtained my PhD in 2001). This was followed by three years as British Academy postdoctoral fellow at SOAS, researching why and how rural people in Tanzania have become Muslim in recent decades. In total, my research has involved about three years in Tanzania, dividing my time between the capital and remote rural regions. I have learned a lot more there than I could ever have imagined, from the Swahili language to how to cook over open fire. I have published mostly on Tanzanian colonial history. The results of my postdoctoral research are to be published as a British Academy Monograph, thanks to a publication award from the Academy. Some of my recent encounters in Tanzania went into an article on 'Rural Islamism during the war on terror: a Tanzanian case study', to appear in African Affairs this summer. Currently, I am preparing to research responses to the AIDS pandemic among East African Muslims.
Anne Blackburn is Associate Professor of South Asia Studies and Buddhist Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. She taught at the University of South Carolina before joining Cornell's faculty. She holds a BA from Swarthmore College, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Blackburn studies Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, with a special interest in Buddhist monastic culture and Buddhist participation in networks linking Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia before and during colonial presence in the region. Her publications include Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton, 2001) and Approaching the Dhamma: Buddhist Texts and Practices in South and Southeast Asia, co-edited with Jeffrey Samuels (BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2003). Her new book, Horizons Not Washed Away: Buddhism, Colonialism, and Modernity in Sri Lanka, is now under review. She has begun work on a new project, Monks, Texts, and Relics: A History of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia.
Mark Ravinder Frost is an independent scholar, writer and film producer, as well as a Research Affiliate with the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He studied Modern History at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and has published articles on South and Southeast Asian history in journals such as Modern Asian Studies and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. He is the co-author of Singapore: the first ten years of independence and the author of two works of history forthcoming in 2009: Imperial Enlightenment, a study of Asian intellectuals in the British Empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Singapore: a living history, a popular history of the city and its people. Between 2005 and 2007, Mark was chief historical consultant and script writer for the National Museum of Singapore’s award-winning Singapore History Gallery. Recently he was a plenary speaker at the Paradoxes of the post-colonial public sphere: South African democracy at the crossroads conference at the University of Witswatersrand (Johannesburg, January 2008)
Thomas Gibson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. His research on Indonesia has appeared in two books, And the Sun Pursued the Moon: Symbolic Knowledge and Traditional Authority Among the Makassar (Hawaii, 2005) and Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia from the 16th to the 21st Centuries (Palgrave, 2007). He is completing a third book, Ritual Knowledge and Social Movements in Islamic Southeast Asia about the relationship between the small-scale models of the ideal self inculcated through ritual and the large-scale models of the ideal state that have inspired social movements throughout the Islamic world in the modern era.
Zulfikar Hirji is an Anthropologist and Social Historian of Muslim Societies and Cultures. He is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. He was formerly a Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Professor Hirji received his DPhil from the University of Oxford, MPhil from University of Cambridge, and B.A. (Joint Honours) from McGill University. Professor Hirji specializes in the social and cultural expressions of Muslims in historical and contemporary contexts. He has conducted fieldwork in East Africa, Oman, Syria and Canada. He has published a number of articles in edited volumes, journals and reference works. He is the co-author and co-editor of _The Ismailis: An Illustrated History_ (Azimuth Editions in association with IIS, 2008), editor of _Plurality and Pluralism in Muslim Contexts_ (IIS, forthcoming) and co-editor of _Places of Worship and Devotion in Muslim Societies_ (Berghahn, forthcoming). Professor Hirji is also co-editor of Routledge series on the Indian Ocean.
Fouad Makki is Assistant Professor at the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. As an undergraduate, I was educated in comparative studies in society and history at Cornell University and received a Ph. D. in sociology from Binghamton University. My principal focus of interest over the past few years has been understanding forms of social power as they change over time, and the way economic systems intertwine with cultural forms in those transformations. I am particularly interested in development processes viewed from a broadly comparative and historical perspective, together with the various theories that attempt to account for them. I am currently engaged in two overlapping research projects. The first is a comparative study of national development trajectories in Northeast Africa in the context of divergent colonial pasts and the post-World War II international political and economic order. The second seeks to examine the complex coping and adaptive mechanisms of local societies in the semi-arid regions of Eritrea, from crop and herd diversification to careful exploitation of ecological niches, and how these are being undermined by the State's drive to fix agro-pastoral communities in particular places, and to pursue a development strategy centered on intensive mechanized agriculture.
Larry McCrea is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in South Asian Languages & Civilizations in 1998 from the University of Chicago, and his BA in 1989 from Cornell University in the Cornell College Scholar Program. He taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard University before coming to Cornell. His most recent book project "The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir", (Harvard Oriental Series, Fall 2008), deals with the conceptual revolution in Sanskrit poetic theory brought about by the work of the ninth century Kashmiri Anandavardhana. He argues that the most crucial innovation Anandavardhana introduced in the field of poetics was his application to literary analysis of a teleological approach to text interpretation imported from the discipline of scriptural hermeneutics (Mimamsa)."
Kaja McGowan is Associate Professor of History of Art at Cornell University. Her work is mostly focused in the History of Art of Southeast Asia with emphasis on Indonesia, particularly Java and Bali studied in relation to the subcontinent. Her research explores the flow of ideas and artifacts along this highway -- architecture, bronzes, textiles, ceramics, performance traditions, and visualizations of the Ramayana -- artifacts that move and those that are locally produced by artists who add, what has problematically been called their own "local genius." This accounts for the shaping of ideas and the development of styles across vast geographical and historical distances. Her recent publications include "Raw Ingredients and Deposit Boxes in Balinese Sanctuaries: A Congruence of Obsessions," in What's the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context, eds M.Pitelka and J. Mrazek; "Love, Death and Shifting Patronage in Bali during the 1930s: Two Spatial Models Meet 'Face to Face' on Sacred Threads of Sound" in Asian Art in the Twenty-First Century edited by Vishakha Desai (Yale University Press, 2007) and Ida Bagus Made: The Art of Devotion (Yasana Ratna Wartha Foundation, 2008).
Michael Peletz is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University.His specialties include social and cultural theory, gender, sexuality, kinship, law, religion (especially Islam), and modernity, particularly in Malaysia, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia. His new book, Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times, will be published by Routledge in March 2009. His other books include Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in Modern Asia (Association for Asian Studies, 2007); Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton, 2002); Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society (California, 1996); and A Share of the Harvest: Kinship, Property, and Social History among the Malays of Rembau (California, 1988). He is also the co-editor, with Aihwa Ong, of Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (California, 1995).
Jeffrey Samuels is Associate Professor of religion in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University. His interests center on Buddhist monastic culture and pedagogical practices. He has co-edited a book with Anne Blackburn on Buddhists texts and practices in SOuth and Southesast Asia and has recently completed a manuscript on Buddhism and the aesthetics of emotion in contemporary Sri Lanka. His current project is writing a social history of Theravàda Buddhism in Malaysia.
Edward Simpson is lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is the author of "Muslim Society of the Western Indian Ocean: The Seafarers of Kachchh" and is currently completing a study on the meaning and scope of maritime sovereignty in colonial India. He also writes about natural disasters and has an interest in memory.
Eric Tagliacozzo teaches Southeast Asian History at Cornell University. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915 (Yale, 2005). He is also the editor or co-editor of three forthcoming books: Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, Movement, and the Longue Duree (Stanford, 2008); with Andrew Willford, Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries Between History and Anthropology (Stanford, 2009); and with Tineke Hellwig, The Indonesia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke, 2009).
Nancy Um is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University (SUNY). Her research program examines the visual culture and built environments of trading communities around the Indian Ocean rim in the early modern period. Her forthcoming book on commercail life, urban space and architecture in the Yemeni port city of Mocha from 1650 to 1750 is being published by the University of Washington Press.
Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, joined the Department in 2002. She currently works in issues of changing religious organizations, practices, and self-understanding in the present era of mass communication, urbanization, globalization and transnational migration. Her past publications contextualized these issues in contemporary urban India and in the Hindu diaspora. Her fieldwork in India has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. Oxford University Press published her new book Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World in 2004, won an award for excellence from the merican Academy of Religion. She regularly teaches a graduate seminar in “Globalization and Religion” and another called “Teaching World Religions in Theory and Practice.” She just returned from a year in Singapore at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore researching new guru-centered religious movements in the city-state (with comparative work in Tamilnadu) funded by a Faculty Research Abroad Fulbright fellowship. During the winter break she will return to Tamilnadu through an AIIS grant.
Andrew Willford is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Cornell University, where he is also currently Chair of the Anthropology Department. His previous research has focused upon various forms of Tamil and Hindu displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the subject of Tamil plantation communities facing the uncertaintites of retrenchment and relocation in Malaysia. Recent publications include: Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, Andrew Willford and Kenneth George eds. (Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell 2005) and Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology, Andrew Willford and Eric Tagliacozzo eds.
Graduate Student Commentators
Nidhi Mahajan, Anthropology, Cornell University. I am interested in the relationship between power, civil society and the flow of commodities through diasporic networks, particularly in the case of Somali immigrants' role in the unregulated khat trade between Kenya and southern Somalia. Somali khat traders in Kenya are part of larger clan networks and access to khat influences power relations among clans and other civil society organizations in southern Somalia. I will trace the movement of khat within these clan networks and link this commodity flow to the struggles for power as they have played out in southern Somalia. I believe that examining the moments in which khat has shifted between legal and illegal status, and the role of illegal and legal Somali immigrants in this trade can help us discuss the ways in which meanings of legal/illegal and licit/illicit are produced and transformed based on political and economic concerns.
Jonathan Young, Asian Religions, Cornell University. I am currently working on my dissertation, entitled 'Adornments of Virtue', which is a study of one of the few texts of the Theravada Buddhist traditions to systematically discuss the religious life of Buddhist laypersons. I also maintain an interest in the history of inter-regional contacts among Buddhists of Southeast Asia (particularly Thailand and Burma) and Sri Lanka. I am especially intrigued by the simultaneous appearance of reform-minded religious movements that arose in these regions during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Juliana Finucane is a Ph.D. candidate in Religion at Syracuse University, working on her dissertation, "Mediating the Dharma: 'Value Creation' and the globalization of Soka Gakkai in Singapore and Washington, DC." Her research contextualizes the growth of the Buddhist group Soka Gakkai in two global cities, focusing specifically on the role of the media in the group's articulation and propagation of transnational values. She just returned from a summer of research in Singapore, and is in her third year of teaching religion and anthropology classes at Wells College.
Nidhi Mahajan, Anthropology, Cornell University. I am interested in the relationship between power, civil society and the flow of commodities through diasporic networks, particularly in the case of Somali immigrants' role in the unregulated khat trade between Kenya and southern Somalia. Somali khat traders in Kenya are part of larger clan networks and access to khat influences power relations among clans and other civil society organizations in southern Somalia. I will trace the movement of khat within these clan networks and link this commodity flow to the struggles for power as they have played out in southern Somalia. I believe that examining the moments in which khat has shifted between legal and illegal status, and the role of illegal and legal Somali immigrants in this trade can help us discuss the ways in which meanings of legal/illegal and licit/illicit are produced and transformed based on political and economic concerns.
Jonathan Young, Asian Religions, Cornell University. I am currently working on my dissertation, entitled 'Adornments of Virtue', which is a study of one of the few texts of the Theravada Buddhist traditions to systematically discuss the religious life of Buddhist laypersons. I also maintain an interest in the history of inter-regional contacts among Buddhists of Southeast Asia (particularly Thailand and Burma) and Sri Lanka. I am especially intrigued by the simultaneous appearance of reform-minded religious movements that arose in these regions during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Juliana Finucane is a Ph.D. candidate in Religion at Syracuse University, working on her dissertation, "Mediating the Dharma: 'Value Creation' and the globalization of Soka Gakkai in Singapore and Washington, DC." Her research contextualizes the growth of the Buddhist group Soka Gakkai in two global cities, focusing specifically on the role of the media in the group's articulation and propagation of transnational values. She just returned from a summer of research in Singapore, and is in her third year of teaching religion and anthropology classes at Wells College.