About the Sawyer Seminar:
The Sawyer Seminar was a series of events and activities held on The Ohio State University campus between August 2013 and October 2014, centered around the theme CrossRoads: Culture, Politics, and Belief in the Balkans and South Asia. The seminar was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The activities of the Sawyer Seminar included:
- A series of nine public lectures by invited speakers
- Two film screenings with discussions led by the film's directors
- A two-semester discussion group and graduate seminar course, jointly led by the core Seminar faculty and postdoctoral fellow
- Undergraduate courses taught on Seminar-related topics
- A conference that brings together specialists on the two regions
- A volume of papers by the invited speakers
- A collection of relevant web resources, articles, and research tools
Principle Investigators:
Dr. Theodora Dragostinova (History)
Dr. Yana Hashamova (SEELC)
Dr. Pranav Jani (English)
Dr. Brian Joseph (Linguistics/SEELC)
Dr. Jessie Labov (SEELC)
Dr. Scott Levi (History)
Dr. Andrea Sims (Linguistics/SEELC)
Dr. Mytheli Sreenivas (History/Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies)
Conference Program:
"Imagining Alternative Modernities:
Interventions from the Balkans and South Asia"
The Ohio State University
October 9-11, 2014
Download the conference program here.
Thursday, 9 October
Opening remarks by Brian Joseph and William Brustein
Roundtable of the Sawyer faculty
Chair: Andrea Sims, OSU
Nostalgia, Loss, and the Politics of Identity
Chair: Yana Hashamova (Ohio State University)
Lukic, Jasmina (Cornell Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College): Transnational literature and nostalgia in post-Yugoslav spaces
[abstract]Zarkov, Dubravka (International Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands): Post-War Alterities: Cinematic Interventions on Loss, Justice and Fatherhood from Bosnia and Sri Lanka
[abstract]Bose, Purnima (Indiana University): The Capitalist-Rescue Narrative, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror
[abstract]Rucker-Chang, Sunnie (Florida State University): Inclusion in the Face of Exclusion: A Parallel Study of Minority Integration in the European Union South and American South [abstract]
Friday, 10 October
Imperial and Post-Imperial Transformations
Chair: Scott Levi (Ohio State University)
Blumi, Isa (Georgia State University): Transitional Regimes and the Contingencies of Multiple Modernities in the balkans, 1910-1923
[abstract]Cohen, Benjamin (University of Utah): Introducing Colonial Regionalism: The Case of the Madras Presidency
[abstract]Pece, Ugur (Stanford University): Fear and Trembling in the Mediterranean: The Cretan Civil War and Breakdown of Ottoman Rule, 1895-98
[abstract]Vemsani, Lavanya (Shawnee State University): Emergence of Geography as Race in Mutli-Religious Country: Tolerance and Conflict in Colonial and Post-Colonial Modern India
[abstract]Keynote I
Tomislav Longinovic (University of Wisconsin-Madison):
"Words That Hide: Balkan Politics of Translation"
Introduction: Jessie Labov (Ohio State University)
Borderlands and Partitions
Chair: Pranav Jani (Ohio State University)
Akhter, Majed (Indiana University): The Long Hydraulic Partition: Making and Remaking National Space in India and Pakistan [
abstract]
Bhan, Mona (Depauw University): Water Wars and New Ecological Imaginaries on the India-Pakistan Border [abstract]
Bego, Fabio (Roma Tre University, Italy): Refusing the State, Defending the Nation: Why Local Albanian Communities Oppose Their Government in the Summer of 1920 [abstract]
Roy, Haimanti (University of Dayton): Paper Rights: Emergence of Documentary Identities in the Partitioned Borderlands of South Asia, 1952-67 [abstract]
Keynote II
Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (Yale University):
“Ethics of Nature: Historical Lessons from Conservation and Development in India”
Introduction: Mytheli Sreenivas, OSU
Saturday, 11 October
The Second and Third Worlds
Chair: Theodora Dragostinova (Ohio State University)
Petrov, Victor (Columbia University): A Cyber-Socialism at Home and Abroad: Bulgarian Technical Assistance to India and the National Road to Modernity 1967-1989
[abstract]Isto, Raino (University of Maryland): The Coalescence of Albanian History: Socialist Realism, Nationalism, and the Vlora Independence Monument [abstract]
Kotecki, Kristine (Ball State University): South Asia and the Non-Aligned Movement in Two Post-Yugoslav Texts [abstract]
Cyzewski, Julie (Ohio State University): “[T]orn between conflicting loyalties”: Mulk Raj Anand and the BBC [abstract]
Neoliberal Critiques and Postcolonial Conditions
Chair: Jessie Labov (Ohio State University)
Karkov, Nikolay (SUNY Cortland): Autonomist Marxism in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: Some Problems of Translation
[abstract]Klein, Kelly (Ohio State University): Darpana Performing Group's Creative Interventions in Neoliberal Globalization
[abstract]Dasgupta, Simanti (University of Dayton): The Contagion and the Condemned: HIV-AIDS, Anti-Trafficking and Sex Work in Sonagachhi
[abstract]Popa, Bogdan (Indiana University): Producing "Bad Subjects": Academic Corruption and Political Protest in Romanian Universities
[abstract]Dhaka, Ujala (Ohio State University, Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow): Kinship, Labor, and Patronage: North Indian Muslims Negotiating Citizenship in the Urban Mohalla
[abstract]
Lunchtime final remarks and discussion
Chair: Mytheli Sreenivas (Ohio State University)
[pdf] Some links on this page are in pdf format. If you need them in a more accessible format, please contact Joseph Ernst (Ernst.150@osu.edu).
