The Mittal Institute Presents the 2021-22 Arts Program Report

The Mittal Institute releases its 2021 – 2022 Arts Program Report.
The Mittal Institute releases its 2021 – 2022 Arts Program Report.
The Mittal Institute was one of just 10 teams selected for Harvard’s Climate Change Solutions Fund (CCSF) award for a new, interdisciplinary initiative focused on South Asia. The project, “Building Data Infrastructure to Understand Climate Change Migration,” will be led by Mittal Institute Faculty Director Tarun Khanna and aims to develop a transformative, open-access climate and population health data-monitoring ecosystem in South Asia. The 10 teams will share $1.3 million in funding to carry out the projects.
The Mittal Institute releases its 2021 – 2022 Annual Report with updates on faculty research projects, student funding, events and more.
The Mittal Institute wrapped up its Annual Symposium yesterday after two days of dynamic panels that touched on South Asia from myriad disciplines and lenses, including the arts, the environment, health, economics, and the next generation. The theme, “The Making of Modern South Asia,” celebrated and commemorated 75 years of independence from British India and brought together guests in person in Cambridge and virtually from countries around the globe.
Through the Seed for Change (SFC) Program, the Mittal Institute fosters and supports the development of a healthy, vibrant ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship in both India and Pakistan. Each year, the Mittal Institute holds this competition to identify and reward interdisciplinary student projects that positively impact social, economic, and environmental issues in India and Pakistan.
Iftikhar Dadi is the John H. Burris Professor in History of Art at Cornell University. He joins the Mittal Institute’s annual symposium for a discussion on Partition’s impact on the arts in a panel chaired by Jennifer Leaning, Professor of the Practice at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and faculty lead of the Mittal Institute’s Partition research, along with discussants Bhaskar Sarkar of UC Santa Barbara and Nadhra Khan of Lahore University of Management Sciences. LMSAI spoke with Professor Dadi about his work and art.
Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of architecture and the history of science and technology. He is interested in experimental forms of scholarship, pedagogy, and design afforded by humanistic inquiry. His most recent book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (Applied Research & Design, 2015), is the first comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin in over half a century. He spent a decade hiking, driving, and boating across the Ganges to map it and to understand the historical conflicts over water for drinking, agriculture, and industry. Combining fieldwork with archival research, the book is an atlas of the enterprise to transform the Ganges into the most hyper-engineered landscape in the world.
Vidya Subramanian, this year’s Mittal Institute Raghunathan Family Fellow, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests lie at the intersection of technologies and societies. Vidya’s current research investigates the changing nature of citizenship in the technological society we now inhabit. Focusing on India, her research is loosely framed by two large issues: the first is on the colonization of the everyday so-called real world by the digital; and the second focuses on how power permeates and is implicated in such technologies. She is mentored by Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. Vidya will be a panelist during a discussion on the “Next Generation of Scholars” at the Mittal Institute’s Annual Symposium on May 19, which will focus on the theme “The Making of Modern South Asia.”