Global South Asian Studies Faculty Accomplishments
Professor Hari Krishnan professor of Dance, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Global South Asian studies, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography for 2024, for his work in choreography.
Hari Krishnan is a dance artist, scholar, and educator specializing in Bharatanatyam, queer dance, and contemporary dance from global perspectives. He explores postcolonial complexities in Indian dance and queer themes. He is among the pioneering generation of choreographers of South Asian origin who began to explore the intersections between traditional South Asian and global contemporary dance forms in the North American diaspora. His extensive body of work arises from a critical awareness of Bharatanatyam, fused with contemporary global dance styles and postmodern, queer, anti-racist and anti-caste social critique. His choreographies are designed to challenge stereotypes and enable minoritized communities to reclaim control over narratives of sexuality, religion, and culture in a global arts world. He is Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University and also artistic director of inDANCE. His monograph, Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. The book has been hailed as “an invaluable addition to the scholarship on Bharatanatyam.” He recently received a Jacob’s Pillow Lab Residency (2024), Wesleyan’s Provost Research Award (2023) and a National Dance Project Grant (2022). Read more here.
For more information on Professor Krishnan's residency at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival please see here.
Professor William Pinch recently published a book chapter “History and Hindi Film,” in Kim Nelson, Mia Treacey, and Marnie Hughes-Warrington (eds.), The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image (London: Routledge, October 2023), pp. 176-193.
This engages with Robert Rosenstone and Hayden White’s reflections on the intersections of film and history by way of my use of film in teaching over the last thirty-two years or so at Wesleyan. I also discuss Navdeep Singh’s film “Laal Kaptaan” (with which I had a small involvement and available on Amazon Prime) toward the end of the essay.
25 April 2024: Professor Pinch gave a (zoom) talk entitled “The Yogi and the Raj: Grappling with an Indian Icon” for a conference on Visual Cultures of Colonial India: A Historical Perspective, Motilal Nehru College, Delhi University. Co-sponsored by the British Art Subject Specialist Network, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale Center for British Art, and the Arts Council of England.
16 April 2024: Professor Pinch gave a talk for Wesleyan’s Wasch Center entitled “The 2024 Elections in India: Politics, Process, Prognosis.”
Professor Andrew Quintman participated on a panel, “Songs of Milarepa,” at the
Jaipur Literature Festival in February 2024
Professor Andrew Quintman delivered a talk: “Buddhism on the Border: The Formation of Religious Tradition on the Himalayan Frontier,” at Indiana University on March 22, 2024
Professor David Nelson performs on April 16, 2024 at the Cleveland Tyagaraja Festival, accompanying the Carnatica Brothers.
Professor Anuja Jain was recently invited to write a short exposition on documentary filmmaker Vinay Shukla's film, While We Watched (2022): "Precarity and Possibility of Dissent,” March 2024. It can be found here: Docalogue, https://docalogue.com/while-we-watched/.
Professor Anuja Jain constituted, chaired and presented on a panel, "Beyond the Screen: Objects, Histories, and Methods of South Asian Cinema Studies" at the Annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, in Boston, March 14-17, 2024. Her paper was titled "Between Stillness and Movement: Afterlife of Images and Indian Cinema of 1960s – 1970s."