Announcements

The South Asian Institute welcomes Dr. Justyna Kurowska as Research Assistant at the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures. She studied Indology at the University of Warsaw and Hindi at the Centre of Indian Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received her PhD in 2019 at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Warsaw University on the modern Hindi novel´s approach to death, dying and the dead body.

We cordially congratulate Dr. Khalid Sanjarani (former member of the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures) for winning the “Best Researcher Award”. The prize was awarded by the Higher Education Commission Pakistan on 7^th of August 2019 for his research on Iqbal and Heidelberg.

Dr. Khalid Sanjarani was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Modern South Asian Languages from 2008 to 2009. Since 2018, he holds a professorship at the Government College University in Lahore.

The Power of Writing: Script and Identity Politics in Contemporary South Asia

The Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures is cordially inviting everybody to this lecture given by Jun.-Prof. Carmen Brandt from the University of Bonn. It takes place on Friday, 17^th of January 2020 in room 130.00.03.

Besides its linguistic diversity, South Asia also hosts a large number of scripts. While the emergence of ethnic groups based on linguistic factors is well studied, research on the influence of scripts on identity formation among ethnolinguistic and religious communities is still at the beginning. This presentation will give a preliminary systematic overview on the importance of writing systems in contemporary South Asia. By presenting some significant examples, it will make apparent that the growing importance of script is connected to the formation and spread of religions, the emergence of ethnic consciousness and nationalism as well as to the evolution of media technologies, for instance to the introduction of the printing press and computer technology. First conclusions in this presentation draw on a comparative study based, among others, on long-term field studies in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Carmen Brandt has been junior professor at the Department for South Asian Studies of the Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany, since January 2017. She obtained a Magister degree in Languages and Cultures of Modern South Asia, Indology, and Communication and Media Studies from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, where she also received her doctorate in 2015.

Please find the poster here