Academic courses, conference panels, and other programs

The Eleventh International Conference on Maharashtra: Culture and Society will be held in Tokyo on 22-24 August 2005. The organizing committee, led by Professor Masao Naito (Chairman) and Professor Hiroyuki Kotani (Secretary-General) invite all scholars interested in participating in it to read their papers. Use this link for the most recent official circular for the conference and two earlier documents on the conference theme.

The University of Chicago Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations currently offers Marathi instruction at all levels. The instructor is Philip Engblom.  The tentative regular offerings for the next (2003-04) academic year are described here. Other levels may be offered upon demand. For additional information contact Philip Engblom.

Ashwini Deo has begun to put a transliteration of the Dnyaneshwari text on a web-site.  Six chapters are currently available at: http://www.stanford.edu/~adeo/dnya.html

Please contact Lee Schlesinger if you are aware of presentations related to Maharashtra at academic or professional conferences and concerning other college or university credit-course offerings in Marathi language or literature.

Old announcements from this page:

from October 2004:

Here is an incomplete list of links to Maharashtra-related presentations at the 33rd Annual Conference on South Asia - October 15-17, 2004 - in Madison, Wisconsin:

Tribal Markings: Art, Space, and Recognition among Mumbai's Urban Tribals
William Elison, University of Chicago

The Vithobas of the Marathi Literary Imaginary: Godbole's Navnit and Lineages of the Modern Abhanga
Philip C. Engblom, The University of Chicago

The Dhangar Vithoba
Anne Feldhaus, Arizona State University

The Dalit and Buddhist Vithoba
Eleanor Zelliot, Carleton College

Cross Currents: Dilemmas and Differentials in the Political Economy of Electricity Reform
Sunila Kale, University of Texas at Austin

The James Laine Affair: An Analysis of Substanceless Content
Spencer Leonard, University of Chicago

Freedom to Grow? Unions, Political Parties and the Institutionalization of Industrial Conflict in South Asia
Emmanuel Teitelbaum, Cornell University

Stately language and language of state
Sumit Guha, Brown University

Rescripting A National Hero: Vishwas Patil's Subhas Chandra Bose
Blair Orfall, University of Oregon

Theater and the Court in Maratha Tanjavur
Indira Peterson, Columbia University

How Did Povada Get into Kirtan?: Colliding Genres and Nationalized Pasts in Marathi Rashriya Kirtan
Anna Schultz, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Mixing in Stores: The Subnarratives of Visvamitra as Textual Performances in the Sanskrit Epics
Adheesh Sathaye, University of California-Berkeley

Colonial Textbooks in the Mythology of ‘Primitive Accumulation
Clare Talwalker, University of Dayton

What Constitutes Politics in Political Society?
Thomas Asher, University of Chicago

English as the Language of Desire
Shefali Chandra, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

The Transformation of Artisanal Towns into Industrial Cities in Western India,
1900-2000
Douglas Haynes, Dartmouth College

Property and the Formation of Secular Hindu Legal Subjects:
Western India in the early-20th century
Rachel Sturman, Bowdoin College

Make Way for the “Mumbaikar”: Shiv Sena Women and the Politics of Urban Identity
Tarini Bedi, University of Illinois-Chicago

from March 2003:

The Maharashtra Studies Group will be meeting in New York City as part of the AAS annual meeting. We have a late evening meeting on Friday, March 28 at 9 p.m in the Morgan Suite of the Hilton New York, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, New York NY 10019 (212-586-7000). Anne Feldhaus, Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University will speak on "Goddesses who Travel." We hope that there will be ample time following Anne's talk to discuss the future of our group and how it might relate to the AAS and/or Madison Conference on South Asia. If you need to register for the AAS meeting, go to their website: www.aasianst.org.

from Summer 2003:

The 2003 South Asia Summer Language Institute (SASLI) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announces an 8-week intensive course in Elementary Marathi which is the equivalent of two full semesters of academic year study.  See the SASLI web-pages for further information.

Hugh van Skyhawk reports that the teaching of Old Marathi has been revived at Universität Mainz, where the late Professor Shankar Gopal Tulpule had taught at the invitation of Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Georg Buddruss in the 1980s. Already, courses have been taught on the Jnanesvari, the literature of the Mahanubhavas, and Sri Sant Ekanath. In summer semester 2003 the Old Marathi course will be reading the eleventh adhyaya of the Ekanathi-bhagavat, and the first course on modern Marathi literature will study Laksmibai Tilak's Smrti Citre.