Nebula and Ursula K. Le Guin Award winning author Vajra Chandrasekera discusses his writing with Anindita Banerjee, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and Suman Seth, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science.

Vajra Chandrasekera is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His novels The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall have between them won Nebula, Le Guin, Ignyte, Locus, Crawford, and Otherwise awards, been selected as New York Times Notable Books of 2023 and 2024, and been nominated for Dragon and Lamda Awards, among others. He is one of the 2025-2026 Fellows of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His short stories, poems, and articles have appeared in many publications including Clarkesworld, West Branch, and The Los Angeles Times. He has worked as a fiction editor for Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Stories, and as a contest judge for the Dream Foundry and the Salam Award. He is online at vajra.me and probably on whatever social media still exists at the time you’re reading this.

Books will be available for sale and signing after the lecture, from Odyssey Bookstore.

The Laidlaw Scholars Leadership and Research Program promotes ethical leadership and international research around the world—starting with the passionate leaders and learners found on campuses like Cornell. Open to first- and second-year students, the two-year Laidlaw program provides generous support to carry out internationally focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and become part of a global network of like-minded scholars from twenty universities worldwide.

At this session, we'll share more information about the program, including independent international projects with the Einaudi Center’s trusted partners around the world for the summer 2026 leadership-in-action portion of the program, and tips for writing a successful application. Applications are due January 12, 2026.

Register here. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

The Laidlaw Scholars Leadership and Research Program promotes ethical leadership and international research around the world—starting with the passionate leaders and learners found on campuses like Cornell. Open to first- and second-year students, the two-year Laidlaw program provides generous support to carry out internationally focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and become part of a global network of like-minded scholars from twenty universities worldwide.

At this session, we'll share more information about the program, including independent international projects with the Einaudi Center’s trusted partners around the world for the summer 2026 leadership-in-action portion of the program, and tips for writing a successful application. Applications are due January 12, 2026.

Register here. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Talk by Aditya Bhattacharjee (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

The cultural affinities that have long connected South and Southeast Asia are particularly visible in Thailand, one of the first countries to recognize India after independence and a nation that occupies a prominent place both in India’s cultural diplomacy efforts and in the itineraries of internationally bound Indian tourists. My talk turns from these well-known forms of state-level and civilizational interaction to the popular and everyday textures of lived, religious worldmaking in which ordinary Thais encounter and make sense of Indian-ness. Drawing on longstanding ethnographic fieldwork that moves fluidly between temples, social media platforms, and unplanned interactions on city streets, I consider how Thai Buddhists in varied settings engage Indian-ness less as a living South Asian tradition than as an aesthetic vocabulary that can be refracted and reinterpreted through a Buddhist grammar of their own.

In practice, this refractive process produces visual and ritual fields in which Indian themes appear in unexpected combinations and take on meanings shaped by local contexts. In these settings, Indian motifs are woven into wider Asian assemblages that combine Buddhist imagery, Chinese prosperity figures, and local protective spirits. Taken together, the talk’s case studies illuminate a distinct Thai Hindu modality whose allure and ambivalence, as perceived by both participants and observers, invite a reconsideration of how Indian-ness travels, settles, and is remade across Asia. In doing so, the talk reframes notions of a global Hinduism through an intra-Asian lens that decenters India as the singular vehicle of religious innovation within its study.

Aditya Bhattacharjee is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow jointly appointed in the Department of Asian Studies and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. His research examines how Hindu identities and ritual practices take shape across diverse cultural worlds, from urban Thailand to diasporic communities in North America. He is currently developing his first book, Global Ganesh: Mapping a Divine Diaspora, based on his dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. The project traces how Thai Buddhist laypeople and monastics engage Indian deities such as Ganesha, Shiva, Vishnu, and various Hindu goddesses in suburban Bangkok and in the American Northeast, using these cases to reconsider how borrowing and appropriation are defined within interreligious encounters. Bringing together insights from material and visual culture, diaspora studies, and theories of ritual creativity, the book challenges India-centered models of Hindu mobility and offers globally informed perspectives on religious circulation in Asia. Before coming to Cornell, Bhattacharjee taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he developed interdisciplinary courses on Asian philosophy, diaspora, and religious art.

Talk by Anu Ahmed (Anthropology, University of Rochester)

The Republic of Maldives has been undergoing rapid social transformations since the country’s democratization in 2008. A decade later yielded the Maldives’ ‘psy’ turn when, starting at the end of 2018, the incoming President prioritized mental health care as the focus of his modernization project. Public and private services offering psychiatry have since proliferated, and psychopharmaceuticals today circulate rapidly through formal and informal networks. How is this state-sponsored “biotechnical embrace” (Delvecchio Good 2007) lived? Many Sunni-Maldivian individuals describe psychopharmaceuticals as a medical technology that assists in containing what are deemed excessive subjectivities, while many others criticize psychopharmaceuticals as producing the very excesses that it is meant to contain. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives from mid-2020 through 2021, this talk explores how patients and kin navigate these competing discourses in an urban landscape that is unevenly marred by histories of dispossession and structural violence. Through person-centered narratives, this talk shows how the institutionalization of psychopharmaceuticals has reconfigured what counts as illness and care in the present as well as in the proximate and distant past. Attending to these entangled temporalities in individuals’ narratives illuminates how psychopharmaceutical technologies provide “ethical affordances” (Keane 2015) through which people posit themselves and others as moral persons in the contemporary moment.

Anu Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. She is a medical and psychological anthropologist who examines how people understand and experience subjective distress, such as madness, and how emergent institutions and cultural discourses shape new moral and phenomenological worlds. Her work is situated in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives, where she was born and raised.

"The Southeast Asian Language Council (SEALC) Projects, 2019–2024: Cornell Collaborations"
Yu Yu Khaing, Jolanda Pandin, Hannah Phan, Thess Savella, and Thúy Tranviet
Cornell University

The Southeast Asian Language Council (SEALC) is a national organization that promotes and coordinates initiatives in Southeast Asian language teaching by working closely with the National Resource Centers (NRC) for Southeast Asian Studies, the Council of Teachers of Southeast Asian Languages (COTSEAL), the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute (SEASSI), and area-specific organizations such as Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program (SEAP).

From 2019–2024, SEALC received a five-year grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support six workshops focused on developing and evaluating instructional materials to strengthen Southeast Asian language instruction. These workshops addressed oral proficiency, project-based and heritage learning, reading materials development, listening assessment, and publication, and were hosted at institutions across the U.S., in Asia, and online for Southeast Asia-based instructors.

At Cornell, five of the six Southeast Asian language faculty—representing Burmese, Indonesian, Khmer, Tagalog, and Vietnamese—participated in various phases of this initiative. In this session, they will share their contributions to the SEALC projects and reflect on their experiences collaborating with colleagues across multiple institutions in both the U.S. and Asia.

Yu Yu Khaing (Burmese) will share collaborative work on Burmese Reading Proficiency Tests from the perspectives of both teachers and learners. She will also highlight how she uses proficiency-based assessment practices in her course quizzes and tests.

Jolanda Mendaun Pandin (Indonesian) participated in five SEALC projects. These collaborative efforts began with seven experienced language faculty in the U.S. and Singapore and later expanded to 14 faculty members from the U.S., Indonesia, Singapore, and Japan. In her presentation, she will focus on two projects: the Oral Proficiency Project (2019–2020), which identified Indonesian-specific language features missing from the 2012 OPI guidelines, and the Listening Assessment Design and Development Project (2024), which strengthened the Indonesian program’s curriculum by advancing listening assessment design and practices.

Hannah Phan (Khmer) will discuss two collaborative projects with Khmer language instructors in the U.S. following her participation in the SEALC projects: the Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL) (2020-2021) and the Reading Materials Development Workshops (2023). She will highlight how these workshops informed methodological approaches, material development, and assessment practices for language teaching and acquisition.

Thess Savella (Filipino/Tagalog) will discuss her collaboration with fellow Filipino language instructors from various universities in the U.S. on two SEALC projects: the Filipino Oral Proficiency Guidelines (OPG) Project 2 (2019–2020) and Listening Assessment Design and Development (2024). She will also provide context on the pre-SEALC Filipino OPG Project 1 (2011–2012), which informed the design of the OPI Project 2.

Thúy Tranviet (Vietnamese) will both open and close the session. She will begin by briefly outlining the six SEALC projects and conclude by highlighting her participation in three — OPG, Reading Materials Development, and Listening Assessment — including the materials she developed for her classrooms and the lessons learned. She presented these insights at the final symposium, Piloting the Proficiency-Based Instructional Materials and Assessment Tools: Insights and Lessons Learned, held in September 2025 at the University of Hawai’i, which marked the culmination of the SEALC projects.

Bios (in alphabetical order by last name):

Yu Yu Khaing (M.A., 2025) is a Senior Lecturer who teaches Burmese at all levels. Since joining Cornell in 2015, she has developed immersive Burmese language courses and multimedia learning materials, supported by a Cornell teaching innovation grant. She is also a certified ACTFL–ILR tester.

Jolanda Mendaun Pandin (M.A., 2000 and 2002) is a Senior Lecturer of Indonesian at Cornell. In 2017, she became the first President of the Consortium for the Teaching of Indonesian (COTI) after its transition to a non-profit, serving two terms from 2017–2023. Since 2015, she has developed conservation-focused listening materials for all levels and actively participated in the Veterinary School’s summer conservation project and One World Health course. A certified ACTFL tester since 2020, she has also collaborated on most SEALC projects since 2019.

Hannah Phan (MPS, 1998) joined Cornell in 2005 as a full-time Khmer instructor. She brings extensive training and experience in language teaching, having studied second-language pedagogy in Russia and Singapore. She has many years of classroom experience and has been a certified ACTFL tester in Khmer since 2009.

Thess Savella (M.A. 1997 and 2000) has taught all levels of Filipino at Cornell since 2002 and currently serves as President of the Consortium for the Advancement of the Philippine Languages and Cultures (CAPLAC). In 2023, she was one of two recipients of Cornell’s Sophie Washburn French Instructorship. She is also a certified ACTFL–ILR tester (since 2013) and a Seal of Biliteracy (SOBL) certification tester (since 2020). Her recent SEALC work include the Filipino Oral Proficiency Guidelines (OPG) Projects 1 and 2 and the Listening Assessment Design and Development Project.

Thúy Tranviet (Ph.D., 2015) has taught Vietnamese at Cornell since 1995. Over three decades, she has created extensive instructional materials for courses at all levels and in multiple formats. An interdisciplinary scholar, her interests span language and literary studies, international education, and international development. In addition to language courses, she has taught content-based courses on community engagement and climate change, including a field trip to Vietnam where students explored environmental issues in both global and local contexts.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

Talk by Karen Donoghue (Journalism and Mass Communication at North Eastern Hill University)

In an era marked by migration, identity and community dynamics are constantly remade, throwing into sharp relief questions of belonging that must be addressed through a post-nationalist lens. My own scholarly focus was sharpened by a personal catalyst, directing my attention to the period of uprising in the state of Mizoram against the Indian government, called Rambuai-“troubled or disturbed land", that spanned approximately two decades, from 1966 to 1986. A body of works known as Rambuai literature serves as a cultural anchor, tying Mizo memory to this traumatic conflict.

This talk extends Rambuai literature beyond its conventional borders into the overlooked, narrow streets of Happy Valley, Shillong, in the neighbouring state of Meghalaya, where a diasporic Mizo community settled. Through their stories, I explore how identity and homeland are rebuilt in the quiet, domestic spaces of displacement. I discuss how unique perspectives emerge when narratives are analyzed through Mizo/ indigenous philosophical frameworks. Specifically, I examine how lunglen, which I loosely translate as “the inability to imagine oneself without the other,” becomes the embodied virtue underpinning the Mizo diaspora’s unique migration and rebuilding experience. I show how this community-centric approach, using oral history and photography, uncovers novel ways to look at migration experiences and the ideas of home and belonging. I will conclude by reflecting on my own positionality as a diasporic researcher and how it directly informs my current project on the Mizo diaspora in the United States.

Karen Lalrindiki Donoghue teaches in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. She holds a PhD from the same university, which critically examines media representation of Northeast India in mainstream Indian media. Her research interests include media representation, media and culture, and oral history. She is currently a member of the executive committee of the Oral History Association of India. Her previous work includes co-leading "Stories from the Valley," an oral history project that documented the experiences of the Mizo diaspora in Shillong, culminating in a published book. She is part of the "Rambuai Archives" initiative, which seeks to record first-hand testimonies from a period of conflict in Mizoram and create a sustainable digital repository for these memories. Driven by the urgency to preserve vanishing histories, her scholarship extends to her current project on the Mizo diaspora in the United States, which investigates themes of transnational identity and community. Beyond her academic work, she is a published poet, with her work featured in the anthology "We Come From Mist: Writings from Meghalaya."

Book talk by Shani Rohit De (History, Yale University) and Ornit Shani (Asian Studies, University of Haifa)

In this paradigm-shifting history, Rohit De and Ornit Shani re-examine the making of the Indian constitution from the perspective of the country's people. In a departure from dominant approaches that foreground the framing of the text within the Constituent Assembly, they instead demonstrate how it was shaped by diverse publics across India and beyond. They reveal multiple, parallel constitution-making processes underway across the subcontinent, highlighting how individuals and groups transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle and a tool for transformation. The book presents a rich tapestry of these interactions, describing how many of the 500 princely states adopted constitutional documents establishing forms of representative government; discussing the contributions received by the Constituent Assembly from associations of women, Dalits, upper and lower castes, and religious groups of every faith and denomination; outlining the contributions from provincial legislatures, the judiciary and the civil service, and finally reviewing the important demands made by some tribal communities. De and Shani argue that the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution became pivotal to the formation, legitimacy, and endurance of India's democracy against arduous challenges and many odds. In highlighting the Indian case as a model for thinking through constitution-making in plural societies, this is a vital contribution to constitutional and democratic history.

Rohit De is an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and a historian of South Asia and the British common law world. He is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Law in the Indian Republic (2018).

Ornit Shani is an Associate Professor in the history of India’s democracy and South Asia politics at the University of Haifa and is the Henry Hart Rice Visiting Professor at Yale University in Spring 2025. She is the author of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (2018)

Talk by Ateya Khorakiwala (Architecture, Columbia University)

What architectural technologies were deployed in response to colonial famine? A history of food is, at its most radical, a history of the production of poverty as a systematic condition and an institutional discourse. This paper seeks to locate famine and starvation, not as a colonial event of economic neglect, but rather a central methodology of extracting labor knowledge from the bodies of colonial subjects. Focusing on the two famines that took place in quick succession in colonial Punjab in 1896 and 1899, this paper looks at two types of documents: the Punjab Famine Code and the Famine Commission Reports. Both documents outline how famine camps and relief works were deployed to manage populations affected by food scarcity. The famine camp and the relief work are two architectural embodiments of famine epistemology. Both typologies claimed to be humanitarian interventions towards famine relief but were instead, this paper argues, methods of extracting knowledge from the bodies of rural laborers. Knowledge such as: how little grain did a person need to survive? What minimum quantity of grain enabled a person to still labor? How bad did starvations conditions need to be before a landowner worked alongside a peasant? In this way, the Revenue Department used architectural technologies to produce a racialized, gendered, and caste-based epistemology of famine. This paper aims to argue that architectural thought on minimum space and famine thought on minimum sustenance share an infernal history that manifests in relief works where technologies of policing rural poor were perfected.

Ateya Khorakiwala is a historian of modernity in its colonial and postcolonial guises in South Asia. the aesthetics and materiality of its postcolonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes. Her current book project Famine Landscapes, is an infrastructural and architectural history set in India’s postcolonial countryside. The book shows how infrastructures of the developmental decades can be traced back to colonial famine policies, physiocratic theories of land management, and utilitarian theories of governance, even as these architectural interventions emerge in a contested field of cold war techno-scientific thinking. She is also researching the labor politics and environmental histories of architectural materials like concrete, bamboo, and plastic. Khorakiwala has received grants and fellowships from the MacDowell Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the American Institute of India Studies. Her essays and articles have appeared in e-flux Architecture, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Grey Room, and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). She coedited Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). Khorakiwala received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, her MS in Architecture Studies from MIT, and was trained as an architect at KRVIA in Mumbai, India.