The History Department is pleased to welcome Dr. Joanna Simonow who will be part of the South Asia Institute as the new Assistant Professor and Student Advisor of the department. Dr. Simonow is a historian of modern South Asia. Prior to joining the SAI, Joanna was Postdoc Research Fellow in the Kaete Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) at the University of Duisburg-Essen (2020-2021), and a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna (2021).

She received her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2019. Her doctoral thesis After the Late Victorian Holocausts has dealt with the regional and transnational history of famine relief, nutritional development and food aid in late colonial and early postcolonial India. Her current research project The Private in the Political: White Women, Interracial Intimacy, and the Global Pursuits of Indian Anticolonialism seeks to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the role of women, gender and sexuality in the global expansion of Indian anticolonialism. To this end, Joanna studies the complex personal, sexual and professional contacts that emerged from the encounter between ‘white’ women and Indian activists in Europe, the United States, Soviet Russia and South Asia in the 1910s to the 1940s.

The volume “Nine Nights of Power: Durga, Dolls, and Drabars”, edited by Ute Hüsken, Vasudha Narayanan and Astrid Zotter was just published as part of the SUNY series in Hindu Studies. Its ten richly illustrated contributions deal with different aspects of the autumnal festival Navaratri (also called Durgapuja/Dassehra/Dasain), arguably the most important Hindu festival. The rituals of this nine-night and ten-day long festival take place in royal, domestic and public spaces. Exploring this festival as celebrated in diverse regions of South Asia and in the South Asian diaspora, this book addresses the following common questions: What does this festival do, what does it achieve, and how? The authors discuss issues of agency, authority, ritual efficacy, creativity, change, appropriation, and adaptation. Please find here detailed information.

This year´s Satadru Sen Memorial Lecture will be given Prof. Kama Maclean (Head of Department of History). It is scheduled for October 2 at 5 pm (SAST & CET). She will speak on "Beyond Failure: Implications of Revolutionary Politics in Interwar India". The Satadru Sen Memorial Lectures are hosted on Mahatma Gandhi´s birthday by Professor Dilip Menon, University of the Witwaterstrand, Johannesburg. They are dedicated to the memory of historian Satadru Sen of Queens College, New York, NY, who passed away in the month of October, 2018. This year’s lecture will be held on Zoom. Please see attached here for an abstract and meeting details.