This course introduces students to two systems of inequity, caste in South Asia, particularly in India, and race in the United States. It’s main objective is to demonstrate how these modes of inequity, sometimes dismissed as outdated or irrelevant, continue to shape social and state institutions like family, law, and bureaucracy. The course will explore sociological literature on caste and race and examine how these systems existed in a range of historical contexts. It will examine how certain groups were recipients of economic, political, and social privilege, and how these groups othered communities such as Afro-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India. We will consider how privileged groups continue to represent modern institutions like state and law that fail to protect disadvantaged communities in both India and the United States. The course will also explore how privileged communities employ the tool of gendered violence of different kinds like physical violence against men and sexual violence against women of Afro-American communities and Dalit communities to maintain forms of social power and control. The final unit of the course will deal with the emerging and imagined solidarities between Afro-American social and political movements in the United States and Dalit movements in India.

This graduate seminar explores intellectual histories of contemporary South Asia. Readings will trace selected literary, cultural, political, religious, and linguistic genealogies that have shaped present-day understandings, practices, alliances and categories of thought in South Asia. Particular attention will be placed on 19th and 20th century global influences and interactions, including with England, Ireland, Germany, the Soviet Union/Russia, Turkey and the Arab World, East and Southeast Asia, the United States, and Africa. Topics will including histories of mapping and census efforts, publishing projects (including those funded by the Soviet Union and the United States), international conferences (e.g., the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions at the World's Fair in Chicago, 1955 Bandung Conference, the 2009 Durban Conference), technological influences and exchanges, and educational institutions and practices. The course will also include discussions of methods for carrying out intellectual history projects and would therefore be of use for students conducting research in other regions of the world.

This course will take up recent scholarship in modernist studies, with a particular focus on literary cultures that were not part of the canonical modernism of the early twentieth century. The course deals both with definitions of modernism, as well as with key moments and case studies of literature. Is modernism single or multiple? How does modernism relate to realism, both at the level form as well as in literary history? What were the politics of modernist literature, especially in the context of the Cold War and the emergence of the Third World? What are the stakes of a temporal and geographic expansion of modernism beyond an early-twentieth century Euro-American modernism of the metropole, to include the literatures of the 1950s and beyond, as well as those of the formerly colonized world? Is the framework of modernism still useful today, or has it become, paradoxically, both too restricted and too diffuse? We will examine literatures in multiple geographic spaces, taking South Asia as an exemplary location and expanding to other contexts. Readings in English and in translation will include both major works of secondary literature, as well as primary texts as relevant. Possible reading clusters include the multiple literatures straddling symbolism, romanticism, and modernism of writers such as Rubén Darío and Rabindranath Tagore; the linguistic tension shared by Yi Sang N. M. Rashed, and Arun Kolatkar; and the Cold War literary debates that took place across the Third World, as seen in the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Bhalchandra Nemade, and O.V. Vijayan. No proficiency in languages other than English is required or expected; however, when possible we will refer to texts in their original language.

This is the second semester of a performance course in the North Indian sitar Students who have not taken the first semester but play any musical instrument are permitted to join. Principles of composition and improvisation will be explored in practice and supplemented by readings and listening. The class gives a group performance at the end of the semester.

Once all PhD course requirements, including languages, have been met, and all exams except the final PhD Oral Exam or Defense has been presented. This stage is commonly referred to as ABD or "All But Dissertation" when a student is completing their research, writing, editing and finally presenting their dissertation.

Urdu literature in translation. Topics vary by semester.

This course will look at the ways that religion intersects with media in South Asia-- exploring how the medium is the message. The class begins with a discussion of how it is difficult to define "religion" and "media" in the Global South, specifically in South Asia. We will analyze how religion and media are inextricable, and also how news media has gone about the business of turning religion into news. The class will familiarize students with a variety of media forms aside from the obvious sources of internet, TV and newspaper-- these include traditional architecture, devotional texts, devotional poetry, music, visual-sensorial worship, modern film, recorded music, clothing, and live performance. We will conclude with a look at religion in forms of contemporary media, with particular attention to new media (TV, radio, internet). The course also offers students lectures providing a foundation of knowledge on a few of the primary religious traditions that will be central to the regions under discussion: Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. There will be guest speakers and a visit to Penn Museum. While much of the course will be immersed in the history and the past, we will conclude by considering contemporary contexts, both globalized and local. There is no prerequisite for the course. All students are welcome.

A continuation of Tabla I, also open to beginning students.

Sugar and Spices. Tea and Coffee. Opium and Cocaine. Hop aboard the Indian Ocean dhows, Chinese junks, Dutch schooners, and British and American clipper ships that made possible the rise of global capitalism, new colonial relationships, and the intensified forms of cultural change. How have the desires to possess and consume particular commodities shaped cultures and the course of modern history? This class introduces students to the cultural history of the modern world through an interdisciplinary analysis of connections between East and West, South and North. Following the circulation of commodities and the development of modern capitalism, the course examines the impact of global exchange on interactions and relationships between regions, nations, cultures, and peoples and the influences on cultural practices and meanings. The role of slavery and labor migrations, colonial and imperial relations, and struggles for economic and political independence are also considered. From the role of spices in the formation of European joint stock companies circa 1600 to the contemporary cocaine trade, the course's use of both original primary sources and secondary readings written by historians and anthropologists will enable particular attention to the ways that global trade has impacted social, cultural, and political formations and practices throughout the world.

Sugar and Spices. Tea and Coffee. Opium and Cocaine. Hop aboard the Indian Ocean dhows, Chinese junks, Dutch schooners, and British and American clipper ships that made possible the rise of global capitalism, new colonial relationships, and the intensified forms of cultural change. How have the desires to possess and consume particular commodities shaped cultures and the course of modern history? This class introduces students to the cultural history of the modern world through an interdisciplinary analysis of connections between East and West, South and North. Following the circulation of commodities and the development of modern capitalism, the course examines the impact of global exchange on interactions and relationships between regions, nations, cultures, and peoples and the influences on cultural practices and meanings. The role of slavery and labor migrations, colonial and imperial relations, and struggles for economic and political independence are also considered. From the role of spices in the formation of European joint stock companies circa 1600 to the contemporary cocaine trade, the course's use of both original primary sources and secondary readings written by historians and anthropologists will enable particular attention to the ways that global trade has impacted social, cultural, and political formations and practices throughout the world.