For Nicole Jain, Ed.M.’11, the children’s book she recently published is the kind of book that would have been helpful when she was a girl. Our Mom, Our Superhero, co-authored with her brother Ravi is about the experience of two young siblings trying to help their mother deal with mental illness. It’s based on the experience the pair had with their own mom. Jain spoke about the book.
Leren Gao, a Master’s of Theological Studies candidate at Harvard Divinity School, spent her summer learning Sanskrit in Kathmandu, Nepal. With her goal of eventually pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Sanskrit is a valuable language to learn for Leren. She shared her experience.
Kheya Melo Furtado, an expert on health systems financing and public health, joins the Mittal Institute as our Spring 2023 Jamnalal Kaniram Bajaj Visiting Research Fellow. She is a faculty member in the Healthcare Management program at the Goa Institute of Management, India. Kheya shared more about her research and endeavors while an LMSAI Fellow.
Francis X. Clooney, a born and bred New Yorker, was following a fairly traditional path toward Jesuit priesthood when he took an unexpected detour that would change his religious and world view forever. Clooney, now Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard, is a leading scholar in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India and the developing field of comparative theology. He has written numerous books, including Hindu God, Christian God (2001) and the more recent Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics (2019). How he found himself at the forefront of Hindu-Christian studies began in 1973 with a trip to Kathmandu, where different religious traditions were not just in books but all around him.
Harvard Law Review has elected second-year student Apsara Iyer as its 137th President. Founded in 1887, the Harvard Law Review is among the oldest student-run legal scholarship publications. We spoke with Apsara about the position, and what she envisions for her tenure.
Our new Syed Babar Ali Fellow, Mariam Zia, joined us in Cambridge this spring, and has gotten right to work on translating the first volume of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s multivolume study of the 46-volume Dastan-e Amir Hamza titled Sahiri, Shahi, Sahibqirani: Dastan-e Amir Hamza ka Mutalea (Sorcery, Magic, Kingship: A Study of The Adventures of Amir Hamza). We spoke with Mariam about her fellowship and impressions of Harvard.
An interdisciplinary team, comprised of Mittal Institute faculty, has banded together to design specific climate mitigation strategies through the project, “Climate Adaptation and Climate-Driven Migration in South Asia: Building an International Research Network for Long-Term impact.” And Harvard University has just awarded the team one of the inaugural “Climate Clusters” grants from Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.
The Mittal Institute is delighted to announce the selection of Nilima Sheikh as the inaugural Distinguished Artist Fellow. Sheikh, a renowned painter based in Baroda, India, will be in residence at the Institute on the Harvard campus from April 17 – 28, 2023.
Last semester, a new multi-year project was launched to research, document, and create conversations around architecture in South Asia. The project, “The State of Architecture in South Asia,” utilizes podcasts, lecture series, exhibits and conferences to ask fundamental questions about architecture’s role and space in the region. The project is coordinated by the Mittal Institute, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), and supported by The Architecture Foundation, India and The South Asia GSD Student Group. We spoke with project conveners Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and an LMSAI Steering Committee member, and Pranav Thole, an urban design graduate student at the GSD and co-chair of the South Asia GSD student group, who also launched a corresponding virtual lecture series, “The Architecture of Transition: Emergent Practices in South Asia.” Fall installments of the series can be found on our YouTube channel – upcoming events are listed below and on our events calendar.
Milind Tambe, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), will be awarded the Feigenbaum Prize at the 37th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference later this month. The Feigenbaum Prize, awarded biennially, recognizes outstanding artificial intelligence research that combines experimental computer science methods with real-world applications.
Economists provide policy advice at the institutional, country, and regional levels, on a host of pressing issues: climate change, education, financial stability, and more. In the recent talk, “Sound Economics can Enrich Pakistan,” Professor Asim Khwaja explored how successful these economic policies have been to the set of challenges facing Pakistan. Asim Khwaja is Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance & Development; Director, Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University; and a Mittal Institute Steering Committee member. He was joined in conversation by the talk’s chair, Alnoor Bhimani, Director, LSE South Asia Centre and Professor of Management Accounting at LSE. The event was hosted in collaboration with the Mittal Institute and the London School of Economics South Asia Centre.