Yale Affiliates Gather in Madison for the 53rd Annual Conference on South Asia

The South Asian Studies Council was thrilled to play a part in a flurry of activity by Yale-affiliated scholars at the 52nd Annual Conference on South Asia (ACSA) hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison from October 29 to November 2, 2024. The Council hosted a reception at the conference venue on the evening of Friday, November 1, which welcomed over 50 individuals—most of whom were currently or formerly based at Yale.

Remarks offered at the reception by Rohit De, Associate Professor of History, emphasized the excitement of gathering so many scholars whose academic careers had been supported at Yale, especially as SASC looks forward to celebrating the 25th anniversary of its formal establishment as an area studies council in the coming academic year.

Prof. De reflected on the reception as “an opportunity to connect with the larger community of South Asianists at Yale,” observing how “It brought together former Yale college alumni, postdoctoral fellows, graduate alumni and faculty, as well as colleagues and collaborators from South Asia and elsewhere.” He expressed surprise and delight at how animated many attendees became about the raffle of several SASC-branded tote bags and other items, remarking that “The raffle was an unexpected hit, with many attendees asking for a repeat in the future!”

Prof. De was quite busy throughout the conference, which was focused this year on the theme of “Democracy and Authoritarianism.” After presenting work relating to his forthcoming book, Assembling the Indian Constitution (co-authored with Ornit Shani), in a roundtable on the making of minority rights in South Asia, De served as discussant for a panel on women in early modern and modern law courts, and finally spoke in a roundtable on anthropologist Lisa Mitchell’s monograph, Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections.

Several other Yale faculty members presented during conference proceedings. Jane Lynch, Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar in Anthropology and SASC’s current Director of Undergraduate Studies, presented in a panel on the Aesthetic Politics of Nostalgia in Contemporary India organized by former Singh Postdoctoral Fellow Kathryn Hardy, who is now Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Supriya Gandhi, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, was the discussant for a panel on Cultural Production During the Long Eighteenth Century in Persianate South Asia. Ameera Nimjee, Assistant Professor of Music, presented a paper titled “Mandeep Raikhy’s Hallucinations: Choreography as Political Worldmaking” as part of a panel on “Imagi-nations.”

Current Yale graduate students and fellows who presented at the conference included Sophia Abbas (History), Logan Emlet (Anthropology and School of the Environment) Nitika Khaitan (History), Harini Kumar (Institute of Sacred Music), Kelvin Ng (history), and Suhail Yusuf (Institute of Sacred Music). 

For Logan Emlet, the intimidation associated with attending his first major conference was eased by his positive interactions with other attendees. He shared, “Any nascent feelings of overwhelm were themselves overwhelmed by the collegiality, curiosity, and passion for their work of the people I met.” Emlet developed such a sense of camaraderie with his fellow presenters on a panel discussing Recent Transformations in South Asian Economies, Environments, and Politics that he brought them all along to the Yale reception. He credited the panel’s discussant, Dolly Kikon (Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and former Henry Hart Rice Visiting Professor at Yale in 2023), with fostering the group’s unique esprit de corps, saying “She was a superb discussant—not only were her comments and questions helpful in pushing my project forward, but she somehow managed to turn our little panel into a group of friends.”

History PhD candidate Kelvin Ng similarly found himself among friends on a panel on Global Histories of South Asian Labor in the 19th and 20th Centuries. In Ng’s case, however, he had forged connections with some of his co-panelists prior to the conference through shared experiences at Yale. Ng’s panel was chaired by Zaib un Nisa Aziz, now Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida, who received her PhD from Yale in 2022. The panel also featured Jonathan Connolly, now Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago, who graduated with a BA from Yale in 2008.

Ng had recently met Connolly when the latter visited Yale in September to give a talk on his recently published monograph, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation. Connolly was glad to catch up with the Yale South Asia community so soon after his visit, saying, “What a wonderful opportunity, having presented my work several months earlier at the SASC Fall Colloquia Series, to reunite with old and new colleagues and friends at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison. I’m grateful to the SASC for sponsoring a conference reception and for fostering intellectual community during the conference as a whole.”