Southern Asia at Chicago

William Mazzarella

Chair, Committee on Southern Asia Studies (COSAS)

5848 S. University Avenue, Kelly 104, Chicago, Illinois 60637
773-702-8637
mazzarel@uchicago.edu

William Mazzarella (PhD, UC Berkeley 2000), Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, writes and teaches on mass media, globalization, public culture and consumerism, critical theory, commodity aesthetics, and post-coloniality in contemporary India. His book, Shoveling Smoke (Duke, 2003), is an ethnography of the Bombay advertising business and its role in the rise and elaboration of mass consumerism in India in the 1980s and 1990s. The book develops a general theory of how the production and circulation of ‘commodity images’ mediates the local and the global, affect and discourse, image and text. Mr. Mazzarella is currently working on a book project tentatively titled The Censor's Fist: Affect, Cinema and Mediation in Modern India.  The book juxtaposes an ethnographic exploration of Indian film censorship debates in the post-liberalization period against a historical reading of the colonial foundations of cinema regulation in the 1910s and 1920s.  The book explores how the medium-specificity of the cinema has been understood across these two historical moments: as a space for the management of public affect vis-à-vis the cinematic image, and as a site for the articulation of social and cultural difference vis-à-vis imagined audiences..

Mazzarella was elected COSAS Chair in 2009 and will serve until 2012.

Tarini Bedi

Associate Director, South Asia Language and Area Center (SALAC) & Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS)

5848 S. University Avenue, Kelly 102, Chicago, Illinois 60637
773-834-9994
tbedi@uchicago.edu

Dr. Tarini Bedi is the Associate Director of the South Asia Language and Area Center and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. She is a cultural anthropologist who conducts her research in Maharashtra, India. Her research and teaching interests are in urban anthropology, nationalism, gender, and local politics in South Asia. Her work has been published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies, The Economic and Political Weekly, and Man in India. Bedi is currently working on a book project on performative politics and the rise of female political patronage in urban India.

Bedi received her undergraduate degree at Bennington College in Social Sciences and Theater, an MA in Political Science from McGill University and an MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Previously, Bedi has worked with the Gallup Organization as Qualitative Research Specialist and Managing Consultant, and as a Researcher at the Center for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Most recently, she was a visiting scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and a Project Manager for Learning Assessment at Carnegie Mellon University.

At the University of Chicago, Bedi is responsible for the administration, planning, and programming needs of the South Asia Language and Area Center and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies.

Michael Burt

Interim Outreach Coordinator, South Asia Language and Area Center (SALAC) & Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS)

5848 S. University Avenue, Kelly 101, Chicago, Illinois 60637
773-702-8635
burt@uchicago.edu

Brian Ashby

Program Assistant, South Asia Language and Area Center (SALAC) & Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS)

5848 S. University Avenue, Kelly 104, Chicago, Illinois 60637
773-702-8637
bjashby@uchicago.edu

Brian Ashby received his BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2006, and was a Junior Fellow at the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and a participant in the South Asian Civilizations Abroad program in Pune, India. Ashby is a filmmaker and photographer, currently finishing the feature documentary Scrappers.

Please contact Brian with any and all COSAS/SALAC questions, including issues with the Southern Asia at Chicago website.