UISFL/SASP conference – program schedule- Sept 21 2011- draft 2
“New Culture and New Welfare in South Asia: the Arts in India”
A public conference and short course (287:150:SCM) organized by the South Asian Studies Program (SASP) with support from an International Programs Major Project grant and the US Department of Education
Thursday October 6, 2011
3:30-4:00 pm Registrationand distribution of materials (UCC 1117)
4:00-4:15 pmIntroductorycomments and welcomeby Dean Downing Thomas
4:15 – 6:00pm Session one: Giving artistic genius and cultural tradition their due (UCC 1117)
Moderator: Paul Greenough (UI History)
Speaker: Philip Lutgendorf (UI Asian Languages)
Speaker: Frederick Smith (UI Asian Languages/Religious Studies)
Film “Rabindranath Tagore” (dir. Satyajit Roy, 1961, 51 min)
Film: “Bollywood Hungama Pays Homage to M. F. Husain”
(2011, 11 min)
8:00-10:00pmPlay performance (Theater Bldg. 172)
“The Prophet and the Poet”by Vijay Padaki
Author will be present and will introduce the play
Discussion follows the performance
Friday October 7, 2011
12:00 – 1:30pm Session two(UCC 1117)
Moderator: TBA
Kathryn Myers (University of Connecticut), “Rangoli/Kolam: Domestic
Tradition and Contemporary Translation of an Indian Ritual Form”
Natalie Marsh (Kenyon College), "Online Puja, Digital Darshan and Virtual Pilgrimage: Hindu Image on the World Wide Web"
1:30 - 2:00pm Break
2:00 – 4:00pm Session three: Bengal: aregional profusion of poets (UCC 1117) Moderator: TBA
Frank Korom (Boston University), “Critical Crossroads: Bengali Bards Confront the Modern World”
Paul Greenough (UI History), “Tagore Floating and Sinking in Iowa and Bengal”
4:00-4:30pmBreak
4:30- 5:30pmFirst breakout session for students(UCC 1101)
Moderator: TBA
5:00 – 7:00pm World Canvass with invited guests(Old Capitol)
Moderator: Joan Kjaer
7:00 - 8:30pm Screening of Sadgati (“Deliverance”) (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1981,
52 min., color) (140 Schaeffer Hall)
Discussion follows screening
Saturday October 8, 2011
9:00 – 11:00am Session four:The deep currents of music and painting (UCC 1117)
Moderator: TBA
Allen Roda (New York University), “Musical Artisans of Banaras: The Art of Tabla-making in Cultural and Musical Production”
Kathryn Myers (Kenyon College), "Contemporary Indian Art--Positions, Places and Prices"
11:00 -12:00pmSecond breakout session for students (UCC 1100)
Moderator: TBA
12:00– 1:30pm Lunch on your own
1:30 –2:30p Panel discussion of Indian arts, patronage and welfare(UCC 1117)
Moderator: TBA
2:30p - 3:00pm Closing remarks, final assignments and appreciation
BIOSKETCHES OF SPEAKERS
Paul Greenough
Frank J.Korom is a professor of anthropology and religion at Boston University. He received degrees in Religious Studies and Anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1984, before pursuing studies in India and Pakistan, He did his graduate work in folklore and folk life at the University of Pennsylvania, and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1992 for a dissertation on Dharmaraj, a local village deity worshipped in West Bengal from medieval times to the present. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, a Ford Foundation cultural consultant in India and Bangladesh, and curator of Asian and Middle Eastern collections at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe prior to his arrival at Boston University in the summer of 1998.Among his research awards have been grants from the Institute of International Education, the Mellon Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the International Folk Art Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the American Academy of Religion, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. He is the author and editor of eight books, most recentlySouth Asian Folklore(2006) andA Village of Painters(2006). An earlier book,Hosay Trinidad, won the PremioPitre international book award in 2002. He was the editor ofReligious Studies Reviewfrom 2001-2003 and currently serves on a variety of editorial and advisory boards. In 2004-2005, he was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in India, where he conducted fieldwork among the Patuas, itinerant scroll painters residing in rural West Bengal. This project culminated in a major museum exhibition in October of 2006. He is currently working on a project titled“The Making of a Transnational Sufi Family,”which is being supported by AISLS.His research and teaching interests range from South Asian expressive traditions and contemporary religion to diaspora studies and transnationalism, which is reflected in his work on East Indians in the Caribbean, the global community of Tibetan refugees, and the peregrinations of a Sri Lankan Tamil Sufi saint. He is also interested in film, ritual, and performance studies. In the spring of 2012, Korom will be a resident fellow of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA, where he intends to take long walks in the woods and complete a second study on the Patuas.
Philip Lutgendorf
Natalie Marsh
Kathryn Myers is a Professor of Painting at the University of Connecticut in Storrt, CT where she has been teaching since 1984. Previously she was an Instructor at The Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio. Her current figurative paintings as well as photographs and digital works are primarily based on research in the art and culture of India. She was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship in India during 2010-11 and has won fellowships and artist’s residencies in Sri Lanka and Chile. She has curated several exhibitions on South Asian art and serves on the board of the University of Connecticut India Studies program.She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia; recent exhibitions include Aurodhan Gallery, Pondicherry India; FundacaoOriente, Panaji, India; Lenore Gray Gallery, Providence, RI and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.
Vijay Padakiis the Honorary President of the Academy of Theatre Arts, a Programme Division of Bangalore Little Theatre Foundation in Bangalore, India. He wears two caps with equal facility. He has been active in the theatre for fifty years. He has been a management professional for over forty years. He joined Bangalore Little Theatre in 1960, the year of its inception, and later served the company in many capacities – as actor, director, trainer, writer, designer and administrator, including three stints as President. He is currently devoting most of his energy to being a theatre educator. During his stay in Ahmedabad between 1980 and 1986, Vijay organized the city's first English language theatre group, The Play Cart, named after the outstanding success of the first production, The Clay Cart. Initiated into training by the Stella Adler system, he introduced the first comprehensive training program for newcomers to the theatre in the late ‘70s, and was responsible for institutionalizing SPOT as a highly respected annual project since the late ‘80s. This has included the unique program for training of trainers. He has written over 30 original plays. In addition, he has adapted or translated several other playscripts. Seagull Books has published a volume of two Gujarati plays translated by him. In 1993 Vijay won the award for the best contemporary play script instituted by The Hindu for the play Credit Titles.
Allen Roda is a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at New York University. He has a B.A. in Anthropology from Wake Forest University and an M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University. His research interests are music and material culture – with particular interest in musical instruments. He has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art updating their catalog of South Asian Drums, and has recently returned from two years of language training and fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh, India sponsored by the American Institute of Indian Studies. He is currently writing his dissertation on “Tabla Making in Banaras” (also known as Varanasi) in which he focuses on the musicality of drum building and the techniques tabla makers use to get “the right sound” that different tabla players require.
Frederick M. Smith is Professor of Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions, University of Iowa. Professor Smith has lived in India for more than fifteen years and has specialized in the history of ancient Indian ritual performance and in the phenomenon of deity and spirit possession in India and elsewhere. He has translated a good deal of material from Vedic sources and from pre-modern Indian devotional philosophy and practice. He has published two major books, most recently the Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in Indian literature and Civilization (2006), and is in the process of translating the final five books of the Mahābhārata, to be published along with extensive introductions, notes, and appendices by the University of Chicago Press (probably 2013).
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