11/07/2019
The University of Pennsylvania invites Mount Holyoke students to attend a conference on aesthetics, social change, and the politics of culture in South India that is being held in honor of Mount Holyoke's own Indira Peterson. The conference will be held across November 9th and 10th, 2019 at The Inn at Penn, 3600 Sansom Street.
To learn more about the conference schedule, please visit this link: https://www.southasiacenter.upenn.edu/events
[Image Description and Text: All text is on top of a piece of artwork depicting three women and a man. The text reads:
New Cultural Histories of South India
Aesthetics, Social Change, and the Politics of Culture
(A conference in honor of Professor Indira V. Peterson).
November 9-10, 2019
The Inn at Penn
3600 Sansom Street
Conference Schedule:
https://www.southasiacenter.upenn.edu/events.
Sascha Ebeling, Elaine Fisher, Stephen Hughes, Lisa Mitchell, Anna Seastrand, Caleb Simmons, Davesh Soneji, Archana Venkatesan, Amanda Weidman.
Building on Professor Indira Peterson’s many contributions to the study of South Indian cultural history, this conference focuses on the practice, performance, reception, and circulation of aesthetic traditions in this region. Following Professor Peterson’s lead, papers will redress the implicit privileging of “the literary” in questions of aesthetics by using a far more capacious understanding of the subject, moving beyond the highly self-contained mode of “intellectual history” that has dominated the study of aesthetic traditions. Participants in this conference have developed deeper engagements with critical social history to understand the politics of cultural production in this region. The conference papers thus integrate the study of aesthetic traditions in South India into complex accounts of social and historical change, demonstrating how these traditions were shaped by, and in turn shaped, the worlds around them. Papers will explore the intersection of aesthetic traditions (both in form and practice), with wider formations of religion, caste, language, and power across various periods and sub-regions of South India.]