Announcements

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

Postponed due to the Corona situation. New dates will be announced in due course.

Bangladesh Studies across disciplines

June 4 and 5, 2020

The Bangladesh Studies Network brings together people studying Bangladesh. While there are a lot of research activities on Bangladesh in various disciplines, these are often only interconnected by chance or personal networks. They are hardly visible to the outside, with Bangladesh remaining, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, an appendix to South Asian studies, which focus on India, and, to a lesser degree, Pakistan. By creating a forum for perceiving interconnections and providing visibility, this conference contributes to strengthening Bangladesh Studies as a field and to eliminating blind spots within Bangladesh studies.

We invite everyone who would like to present their work at the conference to send us a title and short abstract by 30 April, 2020. Please also let us know if you would like to chair a session or be a discussant. As we need to know the number of attendees for catering purposes, please let us know if you are planning to attend by 30 April.

Kindly send your abstract, registration and queries to sophie.weber@stud.uni-heidelberg.de.

Information on logistics and accommodation in Heidelberg will follow.

On Friday, 4th of July at 5 p.m., the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures will again hold a literary evening in Hindi and Urdu in room (010.00.06, CATS).
There will be some recitations in Hindi and Urdu and home-made snacks. Everybody is cordially invited! 

Since the programme is not yet finalised, every proposal for recitations is warmly welcomed and can be sent to Gautam Liu (liu@uni-heidelberg.de) or Arian Hopf (hopf@uni-heidelberg.de).