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.
Nitasha Kaul, a Kashmiri novelist, multidisciplinary academic, poet, economist, and artist who is based in London, headlines the April 7 talk, ‘Inbetween’ India and China: Bhutan’s International Relations. The talk, sponsored by the Mittal Institute, Asia Center and Fairbank Center, traces Bhutan’s history as a Himalayan country sharing borders with India and China, and its foreign policy trajectory. Dr. Kaul, who is also an Associate Professor (Reader) in Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, spoke to the Mittal Institute ahead of the talk about her work.
The Mittal Institute welcomes Yaqoob Khan Bangash as the 2022-23 United States Educational Foundation in Pakistan (USEFP) Fulbright Fellow. A historian of Modern South Asia, Dr. Bangash is Associate Professor, Department of Governance and Global Studies and Director, Centre for Governance and Policy at Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan. He studies Pakistan as a post-colonial state – its state formation, identity, conflicts, etc. Dr. Bangash is the author of A Princely Affair: Accession and Integration of Princely States in Pakistan, 1947-55 and in 2016 founded the first academic literary festival in Pakistan, the ‘Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest,’ which attracted over 25,000 people in 2020. We caught up with Dr. Bangash to learn more about his plans for the upcoming year.
Professor Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies at Harvard University and Chair of the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy and Environment, leads a research group studying how India might forge a path towards a decarbonized energy system. He will present his thoughts at the upcoming March 30 event, “Decarbonizing India’s Energy Economy,” hosted by the Harvard-China Project and LMSAI. The Mittal Institute sat down with Professor McElroy to learn more about his research and the future energy and climate outlook of India.
Milind Tambe, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Director of Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University, has prioritized public health and wildlife conservation as two key areas of focus for his work with artificial intelligence.
The Mittal Institute’s Conservation Science Research and Training Program (CoSTAR) program is an attempt to bridge the gap between art history, museology, art conservation, and conservation science, with the aim of strengthening the practice of conservation science in India. Module 1 of the CoSTAR program began in April 2021 and consisted of a nine-week lecture series. Module 2 of the program was launched in November 2021.