Here is a subset of the recent story about Iraqis being denied asylum and other services by the US. I received this from my friend Mana at Harvard. Felt that it needed attention – maybe one of my state.gov readers can help Omar? From: Omar Dewachi Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 18:16:19 -0500 Subject: Denied [...]
{ 6 comments }
For years, I have carried a torch for Macau. My inevitable answer to any variant of the question, “Where would you like to visit?” was always Macau. Followed by some attempt to explain where in the world Macau was and why the hell would I want to visit it, over such stalwarts as Cordoba or [...]
{ 2 comments }
I couldn’t make it to the AHA this year. Of course, the salt to my wounds, every single one of my peeps did. And they all had a good time and they all talked about how much I suck. I am sure of it. One of my online friends that I missed out on meeting [...]
{ 6 comments }
On December 30, 1906, a group of Muslim leaders gathered in Dhaka and proposed a political association for the Muslims of India, with three aims: to protect Muslim interests, to counter Congress influences, and to support the British administration. The first meeting of this proposed entity, named the All India Muslim League happened in Karachi [...]
{ 13 comments }
In March, I am presenting on a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies. A few weeks ago, we co-panelists thought about ways in which we could enhance the process of writing and discussion on the papers before the conference happens. We are convinced that our idea for the panel could [...]
{ 2 comments }
A Huzzah! to my man Whitney Cox for defending his dissertation today. Much cel[r]ebration will be had. And, tomorrow all concerned are going to the 35th Annual South Asia Conference at Madison. I have a panel Digital Humanities for South Asia with a paper, From Diwan to Database: Digital Archives of South Asia – along [...]
{ 2 comments }
Today’s NYT Magazine cover story by Michael Lewis, The Ballad of Big Mike, relates a rags-on-the-way-to-riches tale about a young football player at Ole Miss. Only the most compulsive Sunday NYT readers will have actually made their way through this dull yet strangely disturbing tale of an inner-city lad weighing 334 lbs. (which figure could [...]
{ 6 comments }
Malcolm Gladwell, they say, re-processes academic work for the NYer crowd [so, the nyer crowd never went to college? is my oft retort]. There is, though, truth to the sentiment. We, the academics, tend to produce dense, jargony, historiographically involved, footnoted and blockquoted works that are designed mostly to get us the jobs, the tenures, [...]
{ 2 comments }
I was in Cambridge to participate in a workshop on colonial knowledge. I had no idea what I was walking into, but with dacoit on my side [a complete surprise], I figured it will be ok. It was great, actually. The participants were equal parts Africanists, SAists – historians and anthropologists. It may have been [...]
{ 1 comment }
The funny bit in the new edition of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is Anderson’s usage of IC… “Aside from the advantages of brevity, IC restfully occludes a pair of words from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.” [via]. Ouch. Yes, some have flogged the imagining horse to death. [...]
{ 1 comment }
Charles McGrath has written a part deux to his expose of term paper mills in today’s Week in Review section of the NYT. Let it be noted that Mr. McGrath has for some reason not discovered the Pakistani Crime Syndicate we unearthed after his article last week. The paper he commissioned this week, a comparison [...]
{ 6 comments }
The NYT reported yesterday in a ‘the internet might be destroying the fabric of our society’ article that students who are desperate, dishonest or rich (or any combination) can buy made-to-order term papers on the World Wide Web for as little as $9.95. A NYT editor solicited term papers on common English lit topics from [...]
{ 12 comments }
Philip Weiss has a short piece in the Nation on Cole, with a terrible pun for a title, that lays out how Cole’s potential appointment at Yale was scuttled. The concluding remarks by Cole, “I knew when I began to speak out that I wasn’t going to be hired. I knew my academic career was [...]
{ 0 comments }
1. If you, or someone you know, works* on the All India Muslim League or on Muslim nationalism in India more generally or on any thing related to the people or events featured in the Muslim anticolonial movement in India, please contact me as soon as possible. We are planning a colloquium in Novemeber and [...]
{ 2 comments }
I have to admit that I am thrilled at the positive response to the Polyglot Manifesto. I wanted to point out that over at Rhine River Nathanael makes a great case for hacking the archive via a digital camera. While I was in the Punjab University archives on research, I must have taken over a [...]
{ 0 comments }
There are, hence, two types of interlocutions required for the historian interested in future-ese. One within the discipline and one outside. One with the colleagues in Social Sciences, Physical Sciences and Computer Sciences and the other with the digital public. In both cases, the historian has to learn to speak another language – to be [...]
{ 14 comments }
During the last few weeks, I have had occasion to think seriously about my discipline, my scholarship and my future. Not entirely the result of writing that blasted Introduction, either. We had a conference recently on the Fate of the Disciplines [scroll down to Recent Events] at which many luminaries wrung their hands and burrowed [...]
{ 21 comments }
Apologies for the lack of postings. It has been a busy couple of weeks. This past weekend, a conference that took a year of planning and execution took place. Sacred Cows & False Prophets: Traversing History and Religion in South Asia or as I called it, Ronapalooza. My idea was to do a simple festschrift [...]
{ 6 comments }
Rajeev is currently planning a course on South Asia History 1600-present [!] and pdcs is planning 5 courses as well. Inevitably, the conversations are on what texts to assign and to what purpose. This happens every spring as we all sit down to plan Fall courses. I asked for suggestions for an Intro on Islamic [...]
{ 32 comments }
Today’s CHE has the pseudonymous Leah Bowman writing about the dangers, nowadays, of teaching or speaking about the “humanitarian costs of the occupation on Palestinians and the necessity of a just political solution”. Well, the right-wing politico-blogo-sphere kinda dangers at least. Charging Middle East scholars with “anti-Semitism,” “liberal bias,” and “support for terrorism” has become [...]
{ 5 comments }
