The Mittal Institute is delighted to announce the selection of Nilima Sheikh as the inaugural Distinguished Artist Fellow. Sheikh, a renowned painter based in Baroda, India, will be in residence at the Institute on the Harvard campus from April 17 – 28, 2023.
Milind Tambe, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), will be awarded the Feigenbaum Prize at the 37th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference later this month. The Feigenbaum Prize, awarded biennially, recognizes outstanding artificial intelligence research that combines experimental computer science methods with real-world applications.
Economists provide policy advice at the institutional, country, and regional levels, on a host of pressing issues: climate change, education, financial stability, and more. In the recent talk, “Sound Economics can Enrich Pakistan,” Professor Asim Khwaja explored how successful these economic policies have been to the set of challenges facing Pakistan. Asim Khwaja is Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance & Development; Director, Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University; and a Mittal Institute Steering Committee member. He was joined in conversation by the talk’s chair, Alnoor Bhimani, Director, LSE South Asia Centre and Professor of Management Accounting at LSE. The event was hosted in collaboration with the Mittal Institute and the London School of Economics South Asia Centre.
Last semester, a new multi-year project was launched to research, document, and create conversations around architecture in South Asia. The project, “The State of Architecture in South Asia,” utilizes podcasts, lecture series, exhibits and conferences to ask fundamental questions about architecture’s role and space in the region. The project is coordinated by the Mittal Institute, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), and supported by The Architecture Foundation, India and The South Asia GSD Student Group. We spoke with project conveners Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and an LMSAI Steering Committee member, and Pranav Thole, an urban design graduate student at the GSD and co-chair of the South Asia GSD student group, who also launched a corresponding virtual lecture series, “The Architecture of Transition: Emergent Practices in South Asia.” Fall installments of the series can be found on our YouTube channel – upcoming events are listed below and on our events calendar.
This year marks the 20th season of the India Conference at Harvard. The conference, organized by students from across Harvard, will run February 11 and 12 at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. The conference theme, “Vision 2047: India at 100 Years of Independence” will explore how India can fulfill her global potential. The conference hopes to build upon its strong legacy of hosting conversations with India’s leading politicians, business leaders, government officials, academics, artists, athletes, philanthropists for meaningful dialogue on India’s path to global recognition. The conference is supported by WNS, with additional contributions from Zydus and the Mittal Institute.
We spoke with conference organizers Anushree Singh (Harvard Business School), Dhananjay Goel (Harvard Kennedy School), Harkirat Bhullar (Harvard College), Umang Daga (Harvard Business School), and Vidhi Lohia (Harvard Kennedy School) about what attendees can expect from the two-day event.
Electric Rehi, or e-Rehri for short, is a 2022 Seed for Change grant recipient that is working towards providing affordable, electric and modular carts for street vendors in Indian cities, making the daily delivery of fresh produce efficient for both the vendors and the consumers alike. Electric vehicle technology is retrofitted to traditional Indian street carts, creating an incremental and affordable transition to green energy. Using this method, any existing cart can be transformed into an electric vehicle while retaining its ability to function as a mechanical tricycle cart.
Yaqoob Khan Bangash is a historian of Modern South Asia and a current Fulbright Fellow at the Mittal Institute (read our Q&A with Dr. Bangash). He is also the coordinator of the upcoming event, “The Pakistan Conference: 75 Years of Independence,” November 29-30 at CGIS South.
The conference aims to bring a focused, though not exclusionary, lens to the study of the country and its 75 years since independence. It will provide the space to reflect upon the past, but also explore the lingering legacies and challenges that continue to cast a shadow over the country. We spoke with Yaqoob about his motivations behind the conference, and what attendees can expect.
Richa Gupta, GSE’21 and co-founder of the Labhya Foundation, has no shortage of ambitious goals. By 2030, she hopes to reach 30-million underserved children with a new “happiness curriculum” in some of the most unserved corners of India. The effort to bring social-emotional learning grew out of her own experiences on the frontlines as a teacher in under-resourced schools for more than a decade.
She and her co-founders, who also brought their life experiences to the founding, now run the Labhya Foundation and received a Mittal Institute Seed for Change grant to catalyze their efforts. Gupta was recently named one of 17 New Young Leaders for the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. We spoke with her about founding the organization, how the Seed for Change grant helped expand their efforts and what’s on the horizon.
Homeira Qaderi is an Afghan writer, activist, and educator and currently is a Radcliffe Fellow. She has written seven books in total, including Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son, which was excerpted by the New York Times and chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best nonfiction books of 2020. This memoir, marked by courage and despair, tells the story of a son she left behind in Afghanistan. Before leaving Afghanistan, Qaderi taught at Gharjistan University, in Kabul, and worked as a senior advisor to both the minister of education and, earlier, the minister of labor, social affairs, martyrs, and the disabled. A lifelong human rights activist, Qaderi was awarded the Malalai Medal—Afghanistan’s highest civilian honor—for exceptional bravery by the president Afghanistan. She spoke with the Mittal Institute ahead of her talk, “Fiction in Afghanistan” on Friday, November 11.
Tania Saaed, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan, and Marie Curie fellow at Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy, recently arrived at Harvard as part of her Marie Curie Fellowship with LMSAI. Her work focuses on comparative and international education, from exploring Islamophobia and securitization in the context of universities in the U.K., to the increasing securitization of education in Pakistan, and across South Asia. She spoke with the Mittal Institute about her work and fellowship.
The newly-published book, The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations, is the first collection of chapters related to Partition studies wherein experts of various disciplines from the three major modern nation-states affected by this cataclysm – Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan – have closely collaborated to develop a nuanced assessment of the Partition as active in the present as well as the past. It is edited by LMSAI Steering Committee member Jennifer Leaning, Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and retired Professor of the Practice at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and Shubhangi Bhadada, Mittal Institute Fellow and Project Director, Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. We spoke with Jennifer and Shubhangi to learn more about the editing process, and what they hope people glean from the compilation.
Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA) in 1972 and dedicated women’s right activist, passed away at age 89. Often called a “gentle revolutionary” for her Gandhian practitice of non-violence, Bhatt championed the lives of marginalized women across the world through SEWA. With a membership of over 2.1 million, SEWA is the largest Central Trade union, comprised of self-employed women workers across 18 states of India. SEWA works to improve their livelihoods through technical training, microfinance, market linkages, technology, and more. Bhatt is the recipient of a host of honors, including an Honorary Doctorate degree from Harvard University, a Radcliffe Medal, and the civilian honour of Padma Shri by the Government of India. Our Mittal Institute community remembers Bhatt and her lasting legacy in the following remembrances.