Talk by Uzma Zafar (Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies, University of Rochester)

This talk explores nationalist temporalities of gender in Muslim transmasculine religiosity. Granted citizenship by the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018, transgender people have become an affective community before the law. Challenges to the 2018 legislative act by the Federal Shariyat Court (2023) have popularized the belief that being transgender is not morally compatible with Islamic practices and society. How does emergent masculinity make its religious morality stable enough to access nationalist legitimacy? This talk thinks with affective religious and temporal planes through an ethnography of psychic states during prayer to imagine a lived theory of nationalist religious temporality.

Uzma Zafar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Susan B. Anthony Institute at the University of Rochester, and an attorney of the High Court of Lahore, Pakistan. His writing, teaching, and legal practice draw from an interdisciplinary approach to law and medical anthropology, concentrating on areas of public health, gender, citizenship, and human rights in South Asia.

Talk by Robert Travers

In around 1818 in Allahabad, an ageing munshi, Sadasukh ‘Niyazi’ Dihlawi, formerly in the employ of the British East India Company, wrote an unusual and salacious Persian history of the age of Mughal decline and British expansionism. This talk reads Munshi Sadasukh’s little-known text, Muntakhab-ut-tawarikh, as a ‘counter-history’ of early British India from the perspective of a middle-ranking, Persian-educated munshi. It shows how Sadasukh’s creative reconstruction of the era of British conquests inserted the figure of the late Mughal munshi as a put-upon steward of imperial virtue facing down escalating threats of financial and sexual corruption. Situating Sadasukh’s fabulous history in the Persianate world of north Indian scribal elites, the talk asks how attending to the political thought of ‘middling’ scribes can offer an alternative perspective on the political culture of early colonial India.

Robert Travers is Professor of History and incoming Director of the South Asia Program at Cornell. He is the author of two books about colonial state formation in eastern India in the late eighteenth century, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), and Empires of Complaints. Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-1793 (Cambridge, 2023). He is currently working on a new history of the parliamentary impeachment trial of the British Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings.

Talk by Nikhit Agrawal

Since 2015, when the Paris Agreement was adopted, agriculture has gained prominence in global climate negotiations, both as a source of greenhouse gas emissions and as a potential contributor to reducing them through carbon storage and sequestration. In the past decade, hundreds of agriculture technology (agtech) start-ups have emerged, promising to design and scale technologically mediated sustainability solutions. India has become a significant destination for investments in these start-ups, offering a unique vantage point to examine their impacts. This talk traces how aspirations to address the ecological crisis urgently and at scale intersect with the complex environmental, social, economic, political, and cultural relationships that shape agriculture. Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) of rice fields, a technique aimed at mitigating emissions by killing methanogenic soil bacteria, has gained traction among tech entrepreneurs as a key sustainability program for reducing emissions. Based on institutional ethnography at an Indian agtech start-up, this talk examines why and how technological interventions like AWD consistently face challenges, often fail, and yet continue to reappear. What drives their persistence despite repeated failures on the ground? How are these tied to the financing and scaling models of climate-smart technologies? By addressing these questions, the talk highlights the tensions and contradictions at the heart of scaling tech-entrepreneurial sustainability and their implications for addressing the intertwined crises of climate change and agriculture.

Nikhit Agrawal is a postdoctoral associate working on carbon and data governance in the Natural Resources and the Environment program at Cornell University. He completed his PhD in sociocultural anthropology at UCLA in March 2026. His research examines tech-entrepreneurial promises of scaling sustainability in contemporary agriculture. Agrawal’s work has been published or forthcoming in Economic Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, Journal of Agrarian Change, Economic & Political Weekly, Scroll.in, The Wire, India in Transition, and The Indian Express. He has received grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the UCLA International Institute and the Center for India and South Asia. His awards include the Robert B. Edgerton Endowed Award and the Eric R. Wolf Award from the Society for the Anthropology of Work, American Anthropological Association. He holds a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi and an MA in Sociology from the University of Delhi.

Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Washington.

Radhika Govindrajan is a cultural anthropologist who works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, gender and sexuality, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology.

Her first book Animal Intimacies (University of Chicago Press, 2018; Penguin Viking India 2019) is an ethnography of multispecies relatedness in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India. Animal Intimacies was awarded the 2017 American Institute of Indian Studies Edward Cameron Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities; the 2019 Gregory Bateson Prize, by the Society for Cultural Anthropology; and the sole Honorable Mention for the 2021 Diana Forsythe Prize, jointly awarded by the Society for the Anthropology of Work and the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. The Indian edition was awarded the 2020 Green Lit Fest Honour for General Fiction and Nonfiction and longlisted for the 2020 Kamala Devi Chattopadhyaya Book Prize. Animal Intimacies is an ethnography of the myriad symbolic, material, and affective relationships that villagers in the Central Himalayas have with a variety of nonhuman animals. It explores how this relatedness is shaped by wider issues and contexts including colonialism, rural-urban migration, changing religious practices, wildlife conservation, and the politics of gender.

Govindrajan is currently working on two research projects. The first, a book tentatively titled Sex and the Village: Scandals and the Nature of Rurality in Contemporary India, explores how scandals around changing sexual identities and practices in rural Uttarakhand provided an occasion for people to offer multiple, often conflicting, theories about the changing nature of rurality and the rural. The second project is concerned with the relationship between elections and broader social life, and examines how electoral discourses and practices and ordinary forms of sociality shape each other in rural and small-town Uttarakhand.

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The Bernd Lambert Memorial Lecture Series, inaugurated in 2017, was established by the Cornell University Department of Anthropology in honor of one of its distinguished emeriti, Bernd Lambert. A transnational refugee from the Holocaust and an ethnographer of the Pacific Islands, Lambert joined the Cornell faculty in 1964 and is remembered for his kind and generous presence. For over 50 years, his research and teaching ranged widely from issues of kinship, adoption, and social organization to myth and symbol. The Lambert lectures honor Prof. Lambert’s legacy by bringing similarly broad-minded scholars to the Cornell campus. Past lecturers have included Didier Fassin, Michelle Murphy, Lee D. Baker, Alessandro Duranti, Hugh Raffles, Sharika Thiranagama, Yael Navaro, and Aisha Beliso-De Jesús.