Category : News
Nov 1, 2022 | Announcements, Community, Faculty, In Region, India, News, South Asia in the News
Adaner Usmani, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard University, is a recent recipient of a Mittal Institute faculty grant for his project, “The History of Punishment in India.” LMSAI faculty grants support research projects that catalyze connectivity between scholars at Harvard and those in South Asia. Professor Usmani’s particular project explores the incarceration system in India and how, despite low levels of policing and punishment, India has remarkably low levels of (recorded) violence. Professor Usmani’s project aims to solve this sociological puzzle by collecting data to understand the history of violence and punishment in India. We spoke to him about his project, his interest in the field, and an upcoming book.
Nov 1, 2022 | Announcements, Community, News, Social Enterprise
Fazle Hasan Abed was a mild-mannered accountant who may be the most influential man most people have never even heard of. As the founder of BRAC, his work had a profound impact on the lives of millions. A former finance executive with almost no experience in relief aid, he founded BRAC, originally the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, in 1972, aiming to help a few thousand war refugees. A half century later, BRAC is by many measures the largest nongovernmental organization in the world—and by many accounts, the most effective anti-poverty program ever.
Scott MacMillan, director of learning and innovation at BRAC USA, sat down with the Mittal Institute to speak about his newly-released autobiography of Fazle Hasan Abed, entitled Hope Over Faith: Fazle Hasan Abed and the Science of Ending Global Poverty. Join Scott for a book launch talk on November 8, hosted by the Mittal Institute and BRAC.
Oct 26, 2022 | Announcements, Fellows, India, News, South Asia in the News
Ajmal Khan Areethala, the Mittal Institute’s Raghunathan Fellow, works at the intersection of the environment, development, and climate change. His current research looks at how universal frameworks of climate justice negotiate with local and specific experiences of climate change in regions of South Asia. His Ph.D. in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai looked at the ongoing nuclear expansion policy in India and local responses. We spoke with Ajmal about his work, and his new book.
Oct 26, 2022 | Announcements, Community, In Region, India, News, South Asia in the News
Yamini Aiyar is the President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research, one of India’s leading public policy think tanks. In 2008, she founded the Accountability Initiative at CPR, which is credited with pioneering one of India’s largest expenditure tracking surveys for elementary education. She is speaking on Rewriting the Grammar of the Education System: Delhi’s Education Reform (A Tale of Creative Resistance and Creative Disruption) at Harvard on Tuesday, November 1 at 5:30pm, and gave the Mittal Institute a preview of her talk.
Oct 26, 2022 | Announcements, Community, In Region, News, Pakistan, Research Affiliates
The Mittal Institute has been growing its on-the-ground presence in South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Nepal. This series of “dispatches from the region” will showcase the ways in which these outposts strengthen engagement, host visiting scholars...
Oct 19, 2022 | Announcements, Community, Faculty, News, South Asia in the News, Students
As a teenager, Richard Delacy’s interest in Hindi and Urdu was piqued – and that interest led to a career as a language scholar and educator. Richard is a Preceptor of Hindi (one of two official languages of India, and 3rd most spoken in the world) and Urdu (spoken by more than 70 million people as the official state language of Pakistan) in Harvard’s Department of South Asian Studies. We spoke with Richard about his language journey and his role at Harvard.
Oct 19, 2022 | Announcements, In Region, India, News, Students
When Seema Kumari arrived at Harvard last year, she was a long way from home–and not just physically. Her remote village in the Indian state of Jharkhand, near the border with Bangladesh, has just 1,000 people, most of whom are farmers and many of whom are illiterate. Her own parents had little schooling, but her father made ends meet at a local thread factory and pooled expenses with his brothers, sharing a roof with 19 family members. Seema had few paths open to her beyond domestic life–until, one day, when everything changed.
Oct 19, 2022 | Alumni, Announcements, In Region, India, News
For our first Alumni Spotlight, we spoke with the Founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation, Piyush Tewari. His story is one of sheer resilience. Piyush turned tragedy into a relentless quest to save lives on India’s roads, which are some of the most dangerous in the world. India holds the global top spot in road crash fatalities and its crash severity of over 31–denoting the deaths per hundred crashes–is the highest amongst the top 20 countries registering the maximum number of road crashes. He also is the driving force behind the groundbreaking Good Samaritan Law that provides bystanders the safety from legal and procedural hassles in the event that they step up to help road crash victims. Piyush graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School with a Masters in Public Administration in 2017.
Oct 12, 2022 | Announcements, Arts at SAI, Community, Fellows, News
This past week, the Mittal Institute welcomed two new VAF Artists, Aamina Nizar and Sharbendu De, to Cambridge for the start of their eight-week research fellowship at Harvard. The VAF program connects artists from South Asia with Harvard’s intellectual resources, and allows a platform for mid-career artists to conduct independent research that explores critical issues in South Asia through the lens of art and design. Aamina and Sharbendu share their early impressions of their fellowship in the following Q&A. And meet them both in-person as they share their work at their Visiting Artist Fellows Art Exhibition, “Capturing the Change, Imagining the Future” on October 24.
Oct 12, 2022 | Announcements, Community, Faculty, News, South Asia in the News
The State of Architecture in South Asia, a new multi-year project, will research, document, and create conversations around architecture in South Asia and the emergent frameworks and models of practice. This multi-year project will utilize podcasts, lecture series, exhibits and conferences to ask some fundamental questions.
Oct 12, 2022 | Announcements, Fellows, In Region, India, News
Sristhee Sethi joins the Mittal Institute as the second class of India Fellows, based at the LMSAI Delhi office. Srishtee studies borderlands and migration, with a focus on the lifeworlds of borderland communities and how ‘border management’ encompasses their...
Oct 5, 2022 | Announcements, Bangladesh, Community, In Region, India, News, Partition, Social Enterprise, South Asia in the News
Tariq Omar Ali received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard and is now an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. His research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia and global histories of capital with a particular interest in how the material and everyday lives of ordinary men and women are shaped by transnational circulations of commodities and capital. His first book, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta was published by Princeton University Press, 2018. He will be presenting his new research examining how decolonization, independence, and the rise of the nation-state restructured the working lives of peasants, boatmen, itinerant traders, and small businessmen in post-colonial East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) in the 1950s and 1960s at the Tufts-Harvard Conference on the 75th Anniversary of Independence and Partition, October 7-9. Prof. Ali will be speaking on Friday, October 7 at 4:30 p.m. on a panel chaired by Prof. Amartya Sen at the ASEAN Auditorium, Cabot Building, Tufts University.
