SAI Event Type : Seminars

AJAY SINHA, Professor of Art History, Mount Holyoke College

Chair: JINAH KIM, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture and Faculty Director, Arts @ Mittal Institute

In the Spring of 1938, an Indian dancer, Ram Gopal, posed in a variety of fantastical costumes for the American photographer, Carl Van Vechten, in New York City. Studying over 100 large-size photographs resulting from the photoshoot, the lecture builds an illustrated story of their mutual fascination and exchange, triggered by the camera. The remarkable images, now part of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, show traces of the myriad, transcultural relations being performed during the photoshoot. They reveal an interplay of differing investments in the image when we ask:  What does the Indian dancer show the camera;  what does the American photographer see through his lens?  Their visual exploration helps us elaborate on an underrepresented history of exchanges between the cultural worlds of India and the U.S. in early-20^th century.

Join Vijayendra Rao in a seminar discussing his paper “Deliberative Inequality: A Text-As-Data Analysis of Indian Village Assemblies” (Co-authored with R. Parthasarathy and N. Palaniswamy).

Vijayendra (Biju) Rao, a Lead Economist in the Research Department of the World Bank, integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology and political science to study the social, cultural, and political context of extreme poverty in developing countries.

He leads the Social Observatory, an inter-disciplinary effort to improve the conversation between citizens and governments. It does this – first – by improving the quality of civic action by strengthening forums for deliberation and developing tools to facilitate collective action, and – second – by building the “adaptive capacity” of large-scale anti-poverty projects;  i.e. the ability of projects to make everyday decisions, and modify project design, on the basis of high-quality descriptive, evaluative and process-oriented information.

His research has spanned a wide variety of subjects including participatory development, deliberative democracy, the rise in dowries in India, the determinants and consequences of domestic violence, the economics of sex work, public celebrations, and culture and development policy.

The paper he will be discussing during this seminar can be accessed here. 

The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute’s Visiting Artist Fellowship (VAF) is an eight-week research fellowship at Harvard that connects artists from South Asia to Harvard’s intellectual resources. The Fellowship provides a platform for conducting independent research that explores critical issues in South Asia through the lens of art and design. The program welcomes applications from mid-career artists in South Asia to come to Harvard University to participate in interdisciplinary discourse with students and faculty on global issues relevant to South Asia.

In this lecture, these fellows will discuss the work they have created over the past year, and comment on their experience during their time in Cambridge.