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Faculty Grant Recipients Tackle Salient Issues Facing South Asia

Faculty Grant Recipients Tackle Salient Issues Facing South Asia

The Mittal Institute annually supports faculty research projects that unite scholars from different fields and regions whose research relates to South Asia. Interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as projects that catalyze connectivity between scholars at Harvard and those in South Asia, are a funding priority. We are pleased to announce this year’s grant recipients—earning the highest individual funding amounts in Mittal Institute history—and their research initiatives.

Todd Lewis on the Revival of Newar Buddhism in Nepal

Todd Lewis on the Revival of Newar Buddhism in Nepal

The Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum launched its spring semester events series with a February 7 talk by Todd Lewis, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross and Research Associate in Harvard’s Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. His talk, co-sponsored by LMSAI, explored “Reconfiguration and Revival: Newar Buddhist Traditions in the Kathmandu Valley (and Beyond).” We spoke with Todd to learn more about the motivations behind his research on South Asian religions, and what society can glean from their teachings

Richard Cash on Solving Dehydration

Richard Cash on Solving Dehydration

“A solution that can’t be applied,” says Professor Richard Cash, Senior Lecturer on Global Health at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and LMSAI Steering Committee member, “is really no solution at all.” He shares more on his cholera dehydration life-saving solution that he and his colleagues first developed in Bangladesh — a solution that is credited with saving tens of millions of lives worldwide. Their oral rehydration therapy (ORT) is a mix of salt, sugar, and water and has helped patients return to their hydrated state as quickly as they had sickened.

Welcoming our New Steering Committee Members

Welcoming our New Steering Committee Members
The Mittal Institute Steering Committee consists of 31 faculty from across the University, including our five new members: Caroline Buckee Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard Chan School of Public Health Richard Cash Senior Lecturer on Global Health, Harvard Chan...

Intensive Hindi Study Trip to India

Intensive Hindi Study Trip to India
This past May, Richard Delacy, Preceptor of Hindi-Urdu, Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University trekked the foothills of the Himalayas, where he and students from his Hindi-Urdu language class were immersed in an intensive language-learning experience....

Mittal Institute Faculty Research Grants

Mittal Institute Faculty Research Grants 2024-25 Announcement Date: October 2, 2023 Submission Deadline: November 15, 2023 Program Details The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute supports faculty research projects with grants. Faculty members at Harvard are...

Building Baby Brains in Rural Pakistan

Building Baby Brains in Rural Pakistan

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.

Mapping Color in History to Transform the Study of South Asian Art

Mapping Color in History to Transform the Study of South Asian Art

Deep in a bank vault of Mumbai’s Asiatic Society lies a revered treasure that is much studied in textbooks but rarely seen. The early 16th-century painted manuscript (dated 1516 CE), one of the oldest of its kind in the world, requires a committee’s approval to see the light of day – a committee that had remained elusive to Prof. Jinah Kim, an expert in South Asian art, for years. But last September, her proposal to study the painted manuscript finally got the go-ahead, and capturing the color from the rare piece of work may just change the study of South Asian art – and maybe all of Asian art – forever.