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.
This year marks the 20th season of the India Conference at Harvard. The conference, organized by students from across Harvard, will run February 11 and 12 at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. The conference theme, “Vision 2047: India at 100 Years of Independence” will explore how India can fulfill her global potential. The conference hopes to build upon its strong legacy of hosting conversations with India’s leading politicians, business leaders, government officials, academics, artists, athletes, philanthropists for meaningful dialogue on India’s path to global recognition. The conference is supported by WNS, with additional contributions from Zydus and the Mittal Institute.
We spoke with conference organizers Anushree Singh (Harvard Business School), Dhananjay Goel (Harvard Kennedy School), Harkirat Bhullar (Harvard College), Umang Daga (Harvard Business School), and Vidhi Lohia (Harvard Kennedy School) about what attendees can expect from the two-day event.
The Mittal Institute offers funding opportunities for scholars and practitioners to engage with the university’s vast resources to advance self-driven, independent research. Annie Rachel Royson joins the Mittal Institute as the second class of India Fellows, based at the LMSAI Delhi office.
During the fellowship, Annie aims to explore key works of translation from colonial South Asia to explore the critical relationship between translation, geography, sacredness, and memory. Annie’s research project will provide a South Asian perspective to the current ‘spatial turn’ in translation studies and will explore the links between translation, landscapes, and memory in the context of colonialism in the region.
Arshaya Sood, a Master’s student in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design, spent her summer in Mumbai, India, conducting fieldwork in the Urban Development department at the World Resources Institute Mumbai. Her work, part of an LMSAI student grant, explored urban planning and urban development efforts on the Mumbai Climate Action Plans Urban Greening & Biodiversity action track, under Cities4Forests initiative. The program works with the city and state governments and the community to improve greening efforts within underserved areas of Mumbai. Arshaya shared her experience in the Q&A below.
Electric Rehi, or e-Rehri for short, is a 2022 Seed for Change grant recipient that is working towards providing affordable, electric and modular carts for street vendors in Indian cities, making the daily delivery of fresh produce efficient for both the vendors and the consumers alike. Electric vehicle technology is retrofitted to traditional Indian street carts, creating an incremental and affordable transition to green energy. Using this method, any existing cart can be transformed into an electric vehicle while retaining its ability to function as a mechanical tricycle cart.
The Mittal Institute presents its Spring Fellows and Visiting Artist Fellows.
The Mittal Institute’s New Delhi Office was a beehive of activity over winter break, playing host to two separate major events: an interdisciplinary conference on indigeneity and a celebration of LMSAI’s past year and new focus on climate change.
On Tuesday, January 17 the Mittal Institute will host the “Interrogating the Indigenous in Northeast India: Political Movements, Cultural Poetics, and the Performative Capital” conference, which will trace “indigenous” as a historical category, investigating the ways in which the indigenous question has become a shared language of social critique in Northeast India. The conference will begin with a keynote lecture on “Indigeneity and Contemporary Northeast India: History and its Contingencies” by Professor Arupjyoti Saikia, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. We spoke with conference convener Ankur Tamuli Phukan, Mittal Institute India Fellow based in our Delhi office. He shared the motivations behind the conference, and what he hopes attendees can glean from the panel discussions.
Komal Shahid Khan, based in Islamabad, Pakistan, was a Visiting Artist Fellow at the Mittal Institute in 2016. She received a master’s in fine arts from the Fatima Jinnah Women University in Rawalpindi, Pakistan with a specialization in miniature painting and was awarded a Gold Medal for her thesis show. After graduating, she started her career with a focus on group shows in art galleries in Islamabad/Rawalpindi and later moved to Lahore and Karachi. She also taught at the National College of Arts Rawalpindi, Pakistan, as a Lecturer. In 2016, she held her first solo exhibition titled “Imagined Immortals” in Karachi, Pakistan. We caught up with Komal to learn more about life after her LMSAI Fellowship.