The torrential monsoon rains in Pakistan have eclipsed the label of a mere natural disaster; Pakistan is undergoing a humanitarian crisis. In the past two months, the heaviest rainfalls on record have killed over 1,300 people and have severely impacted 33 million others. The National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) estimates that over half a million homes have been destroyed. Relief efforts are direly needed given the rapidly-worsening situation. Harvard College Pakistani Students Association is raising funds to provide victims with meals, shelter, sanitary products, and more. Please donate what you can so we can help give much-needed funds to those suffering in Pakistan and please share this far and wide so we can raise much-needed awareness for this perilous situation.
The start of the new academic year at Harvard coincides with a pivotal moment in history for South Asia: August 15 marked 75 years since the end of British rule on the subcontinent. To mark this momentous year, the Mittal Institute is launching a series of events celebrating and commemorating 75 years of “azadi” or “freedom,” and many of the Institute’s faculty and affiliates took a moment to reflect on this momentous occasion in several opeds and interviews.
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.
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.
Sheila Jasanoff, the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Steering Committee member of LMSAI, is a pioneer of the Science and Technology studies field, who says she worked at the “forefront of making things visible that were not yet visible to others.” It is in recognition of these decades of dedication that Jasanoff was recently honored with the prestigious Holberg Prize, an international award from the government of Norway bestowed upon an outstanding scholar in arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology.
Each year, the Mittal Institute supports faculty research projects with grants ranging up to $25,000. Harvard faculty members are eligible for grants that bring together faculty from different fields and regions whose scholarship relates to South Asia. Traditionally the Mittal Institute has prioritized interdisciplinary research, as well as tried to catalyze connectivity between scholars at Harvard and those in South Asia. Meet this year’s grant recipients.
An expert in public health and rights-based responses to humanitarian crises, Dr. Jennifer Leaning has spent her nearly 50-year career at the intersection of war and disaster, atrocities and conflict. Despite witnessing some of the darkest instances of human behavior, it is a ‘kindness of strangers’ motif that motivates her work. She applies this approach to the Mittal Institute’s 1947 Partition Project, which she has led since its inception in 2016.