Harvard will offer many courses in the upcoming semester with content related to South Asia, covering topics such as Himalayan art, Asian diasporas, capitalism and cosmology, Ismaili history and culture, and much more.
“It takes a greater-than-normal effort of the imagination to travel from a manor house library on a Scottish island to a desert outpost in the Deccan,” writes Joshua Ehrlich, PhD candidate in history, who conducted archival research over the summer in the UK for his dissertation on the East India Company.
“Nothing can quite match the thrill of stumbling across a century-old document filled with often-juicy details of a disputed claim of a princely state,” writes Priyasha Saksena, SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School, who spent the summer conducting research for her doctoral dissertation on the relationship between international law and empire.
SAI has awarded grants to 15 students who will travel to India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Pakistan for research and internships.
Asad Liaqat, SAI Graduate Associate, spent the summer working with The History Project in Lahore, Pakistan. He evaluated workshops aimed at improving critical thinking and increasing empathy in schoolchildren in Pakistan and India, especially towards historical narratives.
Jasmine Chia, Harvard College ’18, started her summer in Myanmar intending to study Vipassana Buddhism, but became fascinated with a different topic: a banking phenomenon that explains the links between capitalist religion and political engagement.
See what the SAI community is thankful for this year.
Angela Leocata, Harvard College ’18, interned at Sangath in Goa over the summer to research community-based intervention for maternal depression.
Shaiba Rather, Harvard College ’17, spent her summer conducting research for her senior thesis on the bans of the production and consumption of beef in India. “This topic contributes to a larger question of how identity politics are mobilized in multicultural democracies,” she writes.
Sarani Jayawardena, Harvard College ’17, spent her summer researching how government-issued history textbooks in Sri Lanka have changed and how they depict ethnic minorities during the course of the civil war and afterward.
Haibei Peng, GSD student, spent her summer researching traditional Nepalese architecture and post-earthquake reconstruction.