Between 1724 and 1730, Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur constructed five astronomical observatories, called Jantar Mantars, in northern India. The four remaining observatories are an extraordinary fusion of architecture and science, combining elements of astronomy, astrology, and geometry into forms of remarkable beauty. The observatories’ large scale and striking geometric forms have captivated the attention of architects, artists, scientists, and historians worldwide, yet their purpose and use remain largely unknown to the public.

In this lavishly illustrated lecture, Professor Perlus will take us on a virtual walk through the observatories. We will pause to look at a few of the most important astronomical instruments, and along the way Professor Perlus will tell us about naked-eye sky observation and the unique designs Jai Singh developed to ensure the accuracy and functionality of his measurements. To illustrate his lecture, Professor Perlus will be using the immersive virtual tours and media features of the website he created about the Jantar Mantars, www.jantarmantar.org. Perlus will also draw upon material from his recently published book, Celestial Mirror: The Astronomical Observatories of Jai Singh II.

Barry Perlus is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University, where he taught courses in photography and studio art between 1984 and 2019. With an avid interest in both art and science, his artistic practice includes projects in photography and digital media, notably panoramic and immersive imagery. As an artist / scholar / author/ educator, Professor Perlus has received numerous grants to support his work, including from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell. Portfolios of his photographs have appeared national publications such as Parabola magazine and Progressive Architecture and his work has been shown in more than 50 one-person and group exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad.

Join us virtually for our Wednesday Lunch Series, featuring guest speakers from Cornell's faculty and staff as well as the surrounding community. Enjoy your lunch during an informal discussion, where you can learn more about the speaker's work or research, how they ended up doing what they are doing, current issues in higher education, or even their thoughts on living in Ithaca. Free and open to all, pre-registration via Zoom required. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqcu2qpjMoHte3RuMPC6rLJjkkun…. Jaret Vadera is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores how different social, technological, and cognitive processes shape and control the ways that we understand the world around and within us. Vadera's practice is influenced by science fiction, rorschach tests, and impossible objects. Vadera's prints, collages, sculptures, videos, and installations have been exhibited and screened internationally at venues such as the: Queens Museum, MoMA, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Asia Society Museum, Aga Khan Museum, Bhau Daji Lad Museum, and Maraya Art Centre. In parallel, Vadera has worked as a curator, programmer, and writer on projects that focus on art as a catalyst for cultural change. Vadera completed his undergraduate education at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto and the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. He received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of the Practice in New Media, in the Architecture, Art, and Planning School at Cornell University in Ithaca, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. Jaret Vadera lives and works between Canada, the US, and India. Vadera is currently based in Brooklyn.

Studying the ties and practices that bind Tamils to the districts they inhabit or visit is essential to understand not the ways Tamils use and transform space in diaspora. The territorialization of Tamil identity, that is, their spatial extension and the continuation of their socio-cultural practices, is not always immediately visible in multi-ethnic cities in which Tamils are a minority. Tamils transform those spaces where they are dominant according to their own cultural and social practices and establish venues conducive to social interactions. Furthermore, the polarization of space and the dynamics of identity networks explains the various attitudes of Tamils towards the social frequentation of certain areas. Finally, the presence and role of places of sociability, such as religious, cultural or commercial establishments, are essential to understand Tamils’ relationship with locality and thus the reasons for which these districts are recognized -or not- as “Tamil” by Tamils themselves.

With specific examples drawn from fieldworks in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Paris, this paper will show that the affirmation of Tamil identity and the constitution of Tamil ‘ethnoterritories’ in certain areas is not only the outcome of Tamil action but also the consequence of state-sponsored urban planning policies, such as eradication of slums, gentrification and heritagization of specific zones, and the frequentation of these zones by non-Tamil migrants.

Delon Madavan was the Tamil Studies Visiting Scholar at Cornell's South Asia Program in Spring 2020. He completed his PhD in Geography at Paris-Sorbonne University (France) in 2013. He has taught at the Department of Geography at Sorbonne University and also gave lectures at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. Madavan is Researcher Fellow at the Centre of Studies and Researches on India, South Asia and its Diaspora (University of Québec à Montréal, Canada) and Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Studies and Researches on India and South Asia (CNRS-EHESS, France). In his research, he examines the articulation between migration, identity and space to analyze forms of integration of the Tamil populations in several cities (Jaffna, Colombo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Paris & Montréal). Madavan is the author and co-author of several articles and books on Tamils in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and France.

Respondent:

Sharika Thiranagama is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research explores the intersection of political mobilization and domestic life, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. Her major work has been on the Sri Lankan civil war and research with two different minority ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims, exploring the ways in which militancy, political violence and large-scale displacement became folded into intergenerational transmissions of memory and ethnic identification. Most recently, in new fieldwork on Dalit communities in Kerala, South India, she examines how communist led political mobilization reconfigured older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life. She focuses on the household as the prime site of the inheritance of work, stigma and servitude as well as the possibility of reproduction, dignity and social mobility. She is the author of In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

Join us on Zoom throughout the fall for LRC Happy Hour. Every third Tuesday of the month. We'd love to hear how it’s going! All of it.

Bring your (language instruction) stories whether they be good, bad, amazing, or unusual. It takes all kinds of stories to make a Happy Hour great!Bring your own coffee, tea, or mystery beverage.While we can't serve lunch, the LRC will provide fun, jokes, and laughs free of charge.Also, we just want to see your smiling faces, because we miss you.

More details and link posted on our website: https://lrc.cornell.edu/online-hybrid#live-help-sessions

Chinese migrants and travelers have been traveling to the countries of the Southern Oceans (the "Nanyang", in Chinese) for at least two millennia, and probably longer. We have only scattered records of their passing for the first thousand years of these voyages, but then the documents start to get better, and we can outline the passage of enormous numbers of people, migrating to new lives in the "South Seas". This talk will trace those histories, looking at the warp and weft of Chinese migrations over two thousand years.

Presenter: Eric Tagliacozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_P0QsYVT3RS2-4xxeNH9txA

Part of the series "Migrations: A Global, Interdisciplinary, Multi-Species Examination"

As schools around the United States think about how to best teach English language learners and parents explore a growing number of language immersion programs for their children, it is clear that the language of instruction and positive educational outcomes are inextricably linked. The same is true in South Asia. On September 29 at 4:30PM we will host Professors Christina Davis (Western Illinois University) and Chaise LaDousa (Hamilton College) for a virtual conversation on issues of language and education in South Asia.

Just like in the United States, many languages are spoken in the nations of South Asia. And just like in the United States, differences between languages spoken at home and at school can become a burden for some students and contribute to their problems in school. However, school systems rarely consider the ways that students themselves reflect on these dynamics.

We draw on interviews conducted at a prestigious institute of higher education in India to show how students relate language to their home life, transition to school, and future career ambitions. Students talk about links between language and social identity through the concept of “mother tongue” – literally, the tongue of one’s mother to whom one has an absolute bond. They note that the languages they speak at home rarely correspond to the standardized language varieties found in school materials. Higher education offers students unique challenges as it exposes them to environments where they must exhibit varieties with which they are not entirely comfortable. We focus on the dynamics of linguistic alienation in our interviews. By alienation, we mean the profoundly unsettled quality that emerges from students’ reflections on the place of languages in their lives.

By taking seriously students’ own reflections on language and identity, teachers and administrators might better understand what challenges their students face as they seek educational opportunities.

The Nilgiris Field Learning Center (NFLC) is a transdisciplinary joint program of the Keystone Foundation, India, and Cornell, now in its ninth year. Undergraduates from across the university and young people from the Adivasi communities that Keystone works with, live, study, and conduct community-based research each spring in Kotagiri, India. There are other ongoing collaborations, which will be briefly described by three Cornell faculty who are involved. However, everything ended abruptly with the pandemic, whose effects are amplified in the regions where NFLC research teams are located. The second half of the presentation will focus on the effects that the pandemic has had on the Keystone Foundation’s work, as well as on the NFLC in Kotagiri. We will discuss next steps to take as the pandemic is brought under control.

List of Panelists:

Neema Kudva is Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning, Associate Dean of the Faculty, and Kouse Professor and Dean at Becker House, a living-learning residential community, at Cornell University. Her research focuses on small cities and their regions, and on institutional structures for equitable planning and development, primarily in South Asia.

Andrew C. Willford is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. His current research focuses upon mental health, psychiatry, neurology, and religious healing traditions in North America and India. He has previously worked on the politics of language, religion, identity, and belonging in Bangalore, and on forms of Tamil and Hindu displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia.

Steven A. Wolf is Associate Professor of Natural Resources at Cornell University. He teaches and conducts research on environmental governance with a specific focus on efforts to secure public goods from private landscapes. While most projects address socioecological dynamics in industrialized societies of Europe and USA, he has current projects in India and China.

Pratim Roy is Founder and Director of Keystone Foundation. He was instrumental in setting up the Keystone Foundation with a vision of clarity and focus on eco-development initiatives.

Anita Varghese is Director at Keystone Foundation, and leads the Biodiversity Programmes. She holds a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Hawaii.