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SAI Event Topic : Cosponsored Event

Cultivating Trust Can Unlock India’s Potential

START
Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 12:30am

END
Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 01:50am

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Register here to join the webinar.

Watch the preview video here.

10:00-11:20 am IST // 12:30-1:50 am ET

Join us for the 13th Session of Distinguished Global Indian Speaker Series by Amity University Gurugram, and co-sponsored by The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.

Program:

10:00-10:10 am IST // 12:30-12:40 am ET
Opening Remarks by Prof. (Dr.) Gunjan M. Sanjeev, Vice President, RBEF, Director-International Affairs
Welcome Address by Prof. (Dr) P.B. Sharma,Vice Chancellor, Amity University Gurugram
Words of Wisdom by Dr. Aseem Chauhan, Chancellor, Amity University

10:10-10:15 am IST // 12:40-12:45 am ET
Felicitation Ceremony and Presentation of Virtual Citation to Prof. (Dr.) Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, HBS; Director, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University 

10:15-10:55 am IST // 12:45-1:25 am ET
Special Session: “Cultivating Trust Can Unlock India’s Potential” by Prof. (Dr.) Tarun Khanna

10:55-11:00 am IST // 1:25-1:30 am ET                
Celebrating Three Years of Publication of the Book: Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Emerging Countries, authored by Prof (Dr.) Tarun Khanna 

11:00-11:20 am IST // 1:30-1:50 am ET
Q&A interaction followed by Vote of Thanks by Prof. (Dr) Gunjan M Sanjeev


Border Conflicts in the Himalayas: Bhutan, Nepal, India, and China

START
Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 09:00am

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Wed, Apr 28, 2021

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Webinar

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An Asia Beyond the Headlines Seminar Series

Panelists: 

Sudha Ramachandran, Independent Journalist; Adjunct Faculty, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai

Bhaskar Koirala, Director, Nepal Institute of Strategic and International Studies

Xiaoyu Pu, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Nevada, Reno; Public Intellectuals Program Fellow, National Committee on United States-China Relations; Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Inter-American Dialogue, Washington, D.C

Frank O’Donnell, Postdoctoral Scholar in the Rising Power Alliances Project, Fletcher School, Tufts University; Nonresident Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Stimson Center

Moderator: 

Arunabh Ghosh, Associate Professor of History, Harvard University

Bhaskar Koirala is the founder and director of the Nepal Institute of International and Strategic Studies, which convened the first-ever China-India-Nepal trilateral meeting in 2013. Currently in the doctoral program at the School of International Studies, Peking University, he received his MSc in Public Policy from the London School of Economics and BA (distinction), Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist based in Bengaluru, India. She writes on South Asian political and security issues and has closely followed developments in the region’s conflict zones. She is an adjunct faculty at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai. Sudha has a doctoral degree from the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Frank O’Donnell is a postdoctoral scholar in the Rising Power Alliances Project in the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a Nonresident Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Stimson Center. He was previously a Stanton Junior Faculty Fellow in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. His research specializes in South Asian deterrence and security issues.

Xiaoyu Pu is an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is also a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations and a non-resident senior fellow with the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. Pu received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Princeton-Harvard China, the World Program at Princeton University, and Stanton Fellow at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Brazil.

Arunabh Ghosh is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests in social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, transnational history, and China-India history. Trained at Haverford College and Tsinghua and Columbia universities, Ghosh joined the History Department in 2015 from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, where he was an Academy Scholar for the 2014-15 AY.

Sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center; co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard-Yenching Institute, and Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.


25th Annual Harvard India Poetry Meeting

START
Sun, May 16, 2021 at 10:00am

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Sun, May 16, 2021

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Webinar

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The theme for this year’s India Poetry Reading is “Mother Nature.” This annual event celebrates India’s contribution to the field of literature and invites local poets to recite original compositions in the language of their choosing.

This event is hosted in partnership with the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University and South Asian Poets of New England. This year, the event will be presented virtually.

Please contact Bijoy Misra (bmisra@fas.harvard.edu) or Chandu Shah (bostonwale@gmail.com) for more information and the Zoom link for this session.


Modernizing Asia’s Countryside

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Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 09:00am

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Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 11:00am

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Webinar

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The Harvard-Yenching Institute’s Annual Roundtable

Panelists
  • Han Do-Hyun, Professor of Sociology, Academy of Korean Studies
  • Nguyen Thi Phuong Cham, Director, Cultural Studies Institute, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences
  • Nishikawa Kunio, College of Agriculture, Ibaraki University
  • Mini Sukumar, Department of Women’s Studies, University of Calicut
  • Wen Tiejun, Professor and Director of the Centre of Rural Reconstruction, Renmin University of China
Moderator
  • Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute

This interdisciplinary panel of distinguished scholars from China, India, Japan, Korea and Vietnam will explore the record of successful and unsuccessful efforts at rural development in their own countries. Why have some programs succeeded in increasing productivity, improving infrastructure and public services, alleviating poverty, and ameliorating social and economic inequality, whereas others proved much less successful? What have Asian countries learned from these achievements and shortcomings? And, based on that knowledge, what lies ahead for 21st-century Asian villages?

Co-sponsored with the Asia Center, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies


Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India

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Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 04:00pm

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Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 05:00pm

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Webinar

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Registration required for this event: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ANpdh_VUTvKvpvWk4AbGGA

Speaker: Andrew B. Liu, Assistant Professor of History, Villanova University

Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

Andrew B. Liu is assistant professor of history at Villanova University, where his research focuses on China, transnational Asia, political economy, and comparative history.

This event is hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and co-sponsored by The Mittal Institute and The Joint Center for History and Economics, Harvard University.


Representation from Below: How Women Mobilize in India’s Weak Party System

START
Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 11:00am

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Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 12:30pm

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Webinar

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Tanushree Goyal is a fourth and final year PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Goyal is also an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University. Starting in Fall 2022, she will join Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Affairs. Her research interests lie at the intersections of comparative politics, gender, and development with a regional focus in South Asia. Goyal’s dissertation uses natural, survey, and quasi-experiments to examine important questions in the field of representation and accountability and is set in the context of the World’s largest democracy: India. It shows how female politicians affect change by influencing intra-party politics in the context of India’s urban cities. Female politicians incorporate women as intermediaries and establish cross-electoral level networks to influence political campaigns and party decisions. This “representation from below” fundamentally alters party politics and democracy for good.


Policing and Gendered Cases in India

START
Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 11:00am

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Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 12:30pm

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Webinar

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Nirvikar Jassal is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. His research focuses on gender, sexual violence, ethnic conflict and hate crime, and policing with a regional focus on South Asia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Asian Survey and Journal of Asian Studies. He completed his PhD from the University of California—Berkeley in 2020, and previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and New York City government.


Capacity Beyond Coercion: Regulatory Pragmatism and Compliance Along the India-Nepal Border

START
Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 11:00am

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Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 12:30pm

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Webinar

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Susan L. Ostermann is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her Ph.D. in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes.

Employing both quantitative and qualitative methodology, Ostermann seeks to understand why we sometimes see compliance with regulations in very unlikely places: those in which the state is weak and actors, be they individuals or organizations, have strong incentives to break the law. Her dissertation develops the concept of regulatory pragmatism to explain variation in strategies used by both the Nepali and Indian states to secure compliance with conservation, education and child labor regulations under challenging conditions.

While Professor Ostermann’s research focuses mainly on regulatory compliance in South Asia, she is broadly interested in understanding norms and how they change. Towards this end, she has published papers on inter-caste marriage and the role of skin color in Indian politics. Her current projects are designed to explore the historical roots of conservatism in Indian political thought, the development and expansion of the Indian Election Commission, and variation in sex-ratios throughout the subcontinent. She has also published work on the Indian bureaucracy, state capacity in South Asia, and the 2014 Indian general election.

Ostermann’s work has been published in Asian Survey, Studies in Comparative International Development, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, Studies in Indian Politics and Law & Policy.


Weapons of the Weak: The Violent Consequences of Biased Technological Change

START
Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 11:00am

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Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 12:30pm

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Webinar

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Aditya Dasgupta is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. He completed his PhD at Harvard University and was previously a postdoc at Stanford University.

Dasgupta’s research is in comparative politics, political economy, and political-economic history/development. He works in three areas: (i) the political economy of democratization; (ii) the role of technological change in political development; (iii) the development of state capacity. Much of his work is on rural India, including his book project on the political consequences of the green revolution. Dasgupta is also building a lab on the political economy of agriculture and rural societies (PEARS).

His articles appear in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Economic History, and International Organization and have received awards from the APSA Democracy and Autocracy and Science, Technology and Environmental Politics sections.


Why Do Indians Shun Science?

START
Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 08:00am

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Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 09:30am

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Webinar

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8:00 AM ET // 6:30 PM IST
Join via YouTube: https://youtu.be/imxGZh0NkCk
Add to Google Calendar: http://shorturl.at/dxyCR

It might be odd to aver that Indians shun science — in a country that is lauded as a fount of software engineering, has just touched the heavens with Mangalyaan, and will likely make most of the vaccines for the world.  But, the fact remains that India dramatically underinvests in science, to its detriment. Perhaps worse, we seem to eschew a scientific mindset to promote instead a variety of other modes of reasoning: parochial concerns, religious sentiment, and tradition.

While these have their place, in this talk Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School and Director of the Mittal Institute, will illustrate the costs of our apparent science-phobia by briefly discussing benefits of higher scientific literacy which we could tap into in three disparate Indian settings: the moribund market for jobs among youth, a polluted environment, and crumbling art and architectural heritage. To be clear, this is not a diatribe against the humanities and the social sciences, but rather it is an attempt to direct attention to a costly societal myopia. 

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Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School and Director of Harvard University’s Lakshmi Mittal & Family South Asia Institute. For over 25 years, he has studied entrepreneurship as a means of economic development. He currently teaches courses related to creativity in emerging economies. An online version, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, one of Harvard’s most popular, has been taken by ~600,000 students in over 200 countries. A recent book, Trust, and an earlier one, Billions of Entrepreneurs, chronicle creative ventures in China, India and beyond.

In 2007, he was nominated to be a Young Global Leader (under 40) by the World Economic Forum. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business. In 2016, he was recognized by the Academy of Management as Eminent Scholar for Lifetime Achievement in the field of International Management. The Government of India appointed him to lead several national committees connected to entrepreneurship and higher education. In 2020, he was asked by The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, to co-chair a commission to re-imagine the future of India’s health system.

Outside Harvard, he serves on the boards of the Washington-based global power company, AES Corporation, the global adtech company and India’s first unicorn, InMobi, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, PRS India, a non-profit dedicated to India’s parliamentary governance, is a cofounder of Axilor, a Bangalore-based incubator, and of several ventures across the developing world.


Consequences: South and Southeast Asia and the 2020 U.S. Election

START
Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 12:00pm

END
Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 01:00pm

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Webinar

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Location: Online, via Zoom

Register to join the webinar here: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_b-fBxaQxT96uKpkNd5LpfA

Panelists:

Mattias Fibiger, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Erik Kuhonta, Associate Professor of Political Science, McGill University

Doreen Lee, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Northeastern University; Visiting Scholar, Harvard University Asia Center

Ashutosh Varshney, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences; Professor of Political Science; Director; the Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University

Chair/Moderator: James Robson, James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Victor and William Fung Director, Harvard University Asia Center; Chair, Regional Studies East Asia, Harvard University

Asia Beyond the Headlines Seminar Series, Harvard University Asia Center; co-sponsored with the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute


Art and Science of Heritage Conservation: Finding the Right Balance, Part 2

START
Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 09:00am

END
Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 10:15am

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Webinar

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Join via Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/92896152942
Join via YouTube: https://youtu.be/ekNo4vZwkLA

6:00–7:15 AM PT // 9:00 AM–10:15 AM ET // 7:00–8:15 PM PKT // 7:30–8:45 PM IST // 8:00–9:45 PM BST

This event is the second in a 2-part series. View Part 1 here.

As part of the Mittal Institute’s Program for Conservation of Culture, this webinar will focus on the status of art conservation science in South Asia today. The panelists will explore how to develop and carry out a leading art conservation science program in South Asia.

This event is co-hosted by the Mittal Institute and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) museum in Mumbai, India. 

Moderator

  • Anupam Sah, Head of Art Conservation, Research, and Training, CSVMS, Mumbai

Speakers

  • Vinod Daniel, Board Member of International Council of Museums and Chairman of AusHeritage
  • Anusha Kasthuriarachchi, Department of Archaeology, Colombo
  • Jinah Kim, Professor of Indian and South Asian Art, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
  • Bijaya Kumar Shahi, Founder Chairperson, ICOM, Nepal;
  • Manager Singh, Director General, National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural Property, Lucknow
  • Sharada Srinivasan, Professor, School of Humanities, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru

To add this event to your iCalendar, click here: https://bit.ly/2UsQRCA