Dr. P. Sivakami, an Indian Dalit author who predominately writes in Tamil across many genres of literature, recently spoke at Harvard in conversation with Professor Martha Selby, Sangam Professor of South Asian Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature Harvard University. She first began her career as an Indian Administrative Services officer and later as an author was the first Dalit woman to become a novelist. We spoke with Dr. Sivakami about her career as an author, governmental official, and politician.
This fall the Mittal Institute welcomed Anu Kottemkerry Antony as the new Raghunathan Family Fellow. Anu is a researcher whose scholarship focuses on the themes of subjectivity, women’s religious life and labor, everyday religiosity, and post-secular discourses in the context of Indian Christianity. She is formerly a visiting faculty member at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Tuljapur, India, and she shared what she looks forward to for her upcoming year at Harvard.
The conference was well attended both in-person and on Zoom and had an extremely engaged and interested audience. Each session had a Q&A session with both onsite and online participants engaged in discussion.
Summer is on the horizon and that means it’s a great time to catch up on a book (or two or three!). We spoke with some of the Mittal Institute’s Graduate Student Associates to see what’s on their reading list and to hear more about their favorite reads.
Scienspur, a program that offers free STEM courses to economically disadvantaged students across India, is built on the philosophy of igniting scientific curiosity. All courses are free, and all instructors volunteer their time – something that its students explain is particularly unique. “Very few programs have an interest in helping others with their career, without any profit…it has inspired my classmates and I to give back to others’ education, when our own time comes,” says Ebinesh S, a photonics major from the University of Madras, India. “It was an honor to be a part of an organization that works to elevate scientists from every corner of the globe.”
Exposure to toxic levels of stress and violence in pregnancy or early life can have lasting health impacts. In Pakistan, where the under-five mortality rate is 67 deaths per 1,000 live births, researchers Alexandra Harrison, MD, and Elizabeth Levey, MD—both Assistant Professors of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School—are exploring ways to reverse stress levels and their impacts. As 2022 LMSAI faculty grant winners, their project designs a comprehensive training system for lady health workers (LHW), a common practice across low-resource areas of South Asia that provides pre- and postnatal care. Dr. Harrison and Dr. Leavey’s training system, Building Baby Brains (BBB), equips the LHW with the tools they need to support the infant-caregiver relationship, with the goal of ultimately increasing the neurodevelopment—and decreasing the mortality—of children in rural Pakistan.