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Conferences & Workshops in the US 2013-2014

Future Directions in Pakistan Studies
Conference Organized by: CAORC at the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
April 4, 2015

This was the first in a series of three workshops that AIPS will organize in the coming year and a half. These workshops would explore themes beyond the dominant academic areas of study on Pakistan, namely security studies, gender and Islam. While understanding the significance of the prevailing research focus, these workshops would broaden the scope of discussion and eventually a report would be written that lays out an agenda to determine future research trajectory and production of knowledge on the country. Within this background, the focus of this particular workshop was art and architectural history, urban studies and cultural history. It brought together leading academics who work on Pakistan, including :
• Iftikhar Dadi - Associate Professor, Departments of History of Art and Art, Cornell University
• Kishwar Rizvi – Associate Professor, Department of History and Art, Yale University
• Haris Gazdar – Senior Researcher, Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi
• Rabia Nadir - Assistant Professor and Acting Head of the Centre for Media Studies, Lahore School of Economics
• Manan Ahmed - Assistant Professor, Department of History, Columbia University
• Framji Minwalla - Chair, Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts, Institute of Business Administration, Karachi
• Kamran Asdar Ali - Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology; and Director, South Asia Institute, University of Texas, Austin
The full conference program can be viewed on-line at:
http://www.ii.umich.edu/csas/events/conferences/futuredirectionsinpakist...

Junior Scholars Conference on Pakistan
Conference Organized by: CAORC at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
October 22, 2015

AIPS recently hosted its first Junior Scholars Conference. This conference showcased the new research being done by junior scholars (both recent PhDs and graduate students with ABD status) in the field of Pakistan Studies in the United States. The conference was open to the public and concluded with a joint reception co-hosted by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, which hosted a Conference on Bengali Mangalakāvya and Related Literature on the same day.
Ten conference participants were selected through a competitive process:
• Majed Akhter, Assistant Professor of Geography, Indiana University Bloomington
• Andrew Amstutz, PhD candidate in History, Cornell University
• Yelena Biberman, Assistant Professor, Government Department, Skidmore College
• Elizabeth Bolton, PhD Candidate in Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin
• Waqas H. Butt, PhD candidate in Anthropology, University of California, San Diego
• Abdul Haque Chang, PhD candidate in Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin
• Mariam Durrani, PhD candidate in Educational Linguistics and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
• Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Postdoctoral Fellow in History, University of Texas at Austin
• Faris Ahmed Khan, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University
• Farhan Navid Yousaf, PhD candidate in Sociology, University of Connecticut

Transforming Your Dissertation into a Book
Conference Organized by: Susan Wadley (Syracuse University) and funded by CAORC at the 44th Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI
October 22, 2015

This workshop was sponsored by the American Institute of Indian Studies, AIPS, and several other regional Overseas Research Centers. This workshop aims to help a pre-selected group of recent PhDs re-envision their doctoral dissertations as books. This year Susan Wadley was accompanied by Geraldine Forbes (SUNY-Oswego), Joyce Flueckiger (Emory), Lindsey Harlan (Connecticut College), and Anand Yang (University of Washington).

Rāhē najāt (The Path of Salvation): Religious and Social Dynamics Amongst Mercantile Communities of the Western Indian Ocean
Conference Organized by:Iqbal Akhtar (Florida International University) and funded by the Department of Education at Florida International University (Miami)
November 13, 2015

This all-day workshop will explore religious and social transformations that occurred as a result of migration and cosmopolitanism, such as transformative cosmologies and transnational endowments. It attempts to transcend the transatlantic divide among scholars of medieval and modern trading communities of the west coast of the Subcontinent. For example, early modern Sindh and Baluchistan were home to a diverse array of religious communities from Ibāḍī Omanis to vāṇiyō Jain and Hindu merchants as well as numerous mercantile caste communities, such as the Khōjā and Bhāṭiyā. These South Asian communities were intimately linked to their settlements throughout the western Indian Ocean, particularly East Africa. This conference will explore how processes of migration transformed social dynamics and communitarian identities. 
The complete conference program can be viewed on the AIPS website:
http://www.pakistanstudies-aips.org/content/workshop-florida-internation...