Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research in any field or teaching in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only. The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months.

Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

CANCELED: This seminar will be rescheduled for the spring semester.

Technology Ecosystem to Support Precision Nutrition and Health

Bio: Dr. Mehta is a physician with training and expertise in nutrition, epidemiology, infectious disease, and diagnostics. He is currently the Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. He is also the Founding Director of the Cornell Center for Precision Nutrition and Health and co-director of the NIH-funded Center for Point of Care Diagnostics for Nutrition, Infection, and Cancer (U54) as part of the POCTRN+ network. Dr. Mehta is the program director of the NIH-supported training program (T32) on artificial intelligence and precision nutrition. He also co-leads the Research Coordinating Center for the NIH’s Nutrition for Precision Health Initiative (U24), and directs the Program in International Nutrition at Cornell. The central theme of his research is the interplay between nutrition and disease, including facilitating field-friendly assessment for both and elucidating how nutrition can be used as a modifiable risk factor to improve health and associated outcomes, often in the context of pregnancy and early childhood. This is achieved through a combination of active surveillance programs, the invention of point-of-care diagnostics, and randomized controlled trials primarily in India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

Dr. Mehta received his medical degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India and followed it up with doctoral degree in Epidemiology and Nutrition from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including a NIH technology accelerator challenge prize for innovative global health diagnostics, the Norman Kretchmer memorial award for nutrition and development, the Rainer Gross Prize for innovations in nutrition and health, and the SUNY Chancellor award for scholarship and creative activities.

Reinventing Anthropology of Caste

The abjection of dalits/low caste has been studied extensively by anthropologists, as a way to understand caste inequality in India. Instead of focusing on dalits as a site of caste’s production, I reverse the gaze to consider the deployment of ‘woundedness’ by non-dalit or upper castes. I look at how upper castes take hold of the language and performance of subalternity as a means of situating themselves favorably in Indian democratic politics and ask - in what ways do upper castes construct their personhood and identity through victimhood and woundedness? In interweaving cultural analysis and ethnography, I engage the complex relationship between regimes of affect, power, and caste as they implicate the production of a twisted, weaponized form of vulnerability.

By ‘studying up’ caste, I re-create modes of citation and knowledge production using a language which doesn’t imagine the marginalized body to hold the burden of doing the work of pain, trauma, and violence. Through upper caste victimhood and woundedness, I make sense of simultaneous humanity and inhumanity of those who inflict violence onto the disenfranchised while purporting to the world that their own communities are under siege. My work draws on ethnographic research with two upper caste communities – jats and brahmins – in north India.

Akhil Kang is a PhD candidate in Socio-cultural Anthropology at Cornell University. Akhil is academically and politically invested in shifting the anthropological gaze away from the marginalized and towards the elite. Their PhD project builds an anthropology of the elite and they study upper caste victimhood and woundedness in parts of North India. With a focus on questions related to affect and body politics, Akhil is ethnographically exploring what makes an upper caste - an upper caste. They are an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of several fields including critical caste and dalit studies; feminist and queer studies; affect and media studies; biopolitics and postcoloniality. Their project has received support from the Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.

Prior to enrolling at Cornell, Akhil received their B.A. LLB (Hons.) from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad and is a registered Advocate with Bar Council of Delhi. They worked as a human rights lawyer in Delhi before pursuing their PhD. Born and raised in Jalandhar (Punjab, India), they have been involved in queer and anti-caste activism. They have worked on several projects including, role of men and masculinity in child marriages in India, feminist law archiving, and understanding gender and sexuality in institutional student movements & political formations in India. They write about sex, politics and desire at their blog Desi Underground Gay. Their academic works can be found on their Academia profile.

Recent Publications -

Savarna Citations of Desire: Queer Impossibilities of Inter-Caste Love

Brahmin Men who love to Eat A**

Description:

In Afghanistan, poetry operates as a common idiom, appearing frequently in everyday speech by those who have and have not received formal education. In this talk, I explore the idea of a communal self that emerges through the composition of poetry in the service of jihad as seen in Afghan resistance literatures written during the 1980s war with the Soviets. This is evidenced partially through the publication of anonymized poetry and the obfuscation of the authorial voice. I argue that when poetry is composed on behalf of jihad, it is no longer written only by and for the self, but becomes part of a broader campaign, therein gesturing to something larger.

Biography

Seema Golestaneh is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell. Her research, situated at the nexus of anthropology and religious studies, is focused on expressions of contemporary Islamic thought in the Persian-speaking world, with particularly interest in how metaphysical experiences make themselves known in the socio-material realm via aesthetics and epistemology. Her forthcoming book, Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran, examines the social and material life of gnosis (ma’arifat) for disparate Sufi communities in Iran. Essentially an anthropology of the imagination, my work also relies heavily on textual ethnography and analysis, emphasizing the importance of hermeneutics within the Iranian socio-theological sphere. Prof. Golestenah is currently at work on a project tentatively entitled Utopia Lost?:Afghan Theories of Radical Poetics and Islamic Governance. Drawing largely from archival materials and oral histories, Utopia Lost investigates the dreams and aspirations of Afghan intellectuals in the late 1980s and 1990s for forms of government that did not come to pass.