Events

“Reconstitutions: Women’s Performance and Aestheticized Caste Politics in Urban South India”

Monday, November 4, 2019 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Logan 501

Theater and Performance Studies Workshop by Davesh Soneji, Associate Professor, Chair of Graduate Studies, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Davesh Soneji is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie at the intersections of social and cultural history, religion, and anthropology. For the past two decades, he has produced research that focuses primarily on religion and the performing arts in South India, but also includes work on gender, class, caste, and colonialism. He is best known for his work on the social history of professional female artists in Tamil and Telugu-speaking South India and is author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from The Association for Asian Studies (AAS). He is also editor of Bharatanāṭyam: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2010; 2012) and co-editor, with Indira Viswanathan Peterson, of Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India (Oxford University Press, 2008). He is presently co-editing another volume entitled Dance and the Early South Indian Cinema (forthcoming). He is currently working a new book on the social history of “classical” (Karṇāṭak) music and musical production in South India from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

Excerpts from Davesh’s book, Unfinished Gestures, to be read prior to the workshop are available here.

Password: unfinished

This event is free and open to the public. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions and concerns to the workshop coordinators, Arianna Gass (ariannagass@uchicago.edu) and Eva Pensis (pensis@uchicago.edu).

Dates:
Monday, November 4, 2019 – 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Logan 501