March 24, 2017
9am-5pm | Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
This one-day conference will be held on Friday, March 24, 2017 at 1636 School of Social Work Building. The aim of the conference is to showcase the work of graduate students at the university who are working on any aspect of South Asia, past, present, or future. The conference features graduate students from several disciplines and at different stages of their career. The participants at the conference may expect a sustained discussion of each of the presentations by an interdisciplinary audience of faculty and students. Professor Douglas E. Haynes, Dartmouth College, has kindly agreed to serve as keynote speaker for the conference.
Keynote Presentation
Brand-Name Capitalism, Advertising and the Making of Modern Conjugality in Western India, 1918-1940
Douglas Haynes, Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Professor Douglas Haynes is an historian of South Asia at Dartmouth College, and teaches courses on modern South Asia, on Gandhi, and on Dalits in modern India. He also has a strong interest in the comparative history of the colonial world; some of his recent classes include Colonialism, Nationalism and Revolution in Southeast Asia; Colonialism, Development and the Environment in Africa and Asia; and Colonialism and Culture in Asia and Africa. Focusing in his research on the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century western India, he has covered such topic areas as cities and urban politics, artisans and merchants, capitalism, consumption and advertising, masculinity, conjugality and sexuality. His book, Small-Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press) won the John F. Richards Prize of the American Historical Association for the most distinguished book in English on South Asian history for 2012. He previously completed Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India, a study on the cultural accommodations of elites in Surat, a small Indian city, to British domination. The author of many essays, he has co-edited Contesting Power (1991, with Gyan Prakash) on "everyday resistance" in South Asian society and history, Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (2010, with Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy and Haruka Yanagisawa) and a special issue in the journal South Asia on the urban history of the Indian subcontinent during the mid-twentieth century (2013, with Nikhil Rao). Along with Veronika Fuechtner of the German Department at Dartmouth and Ryan Jones of SUNY Geneseo, he has recently been involved in editing a volume of essays on the global history of sexual science (forthcoming from University of California Press in 2017). His current work, on the history of advertising in western India and its role in shaping modern conjugality from 1918 to 1945 has been awarded grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies (research) and from the National Endowment for the Humanities (writing).
