Events

Fall 2026 Events

• Thursday, August 27th
  Ice Cream Social at Sarabha’s Creamery from 3-5 PM
  

Asian Studies Around Campus and nashville!

• Sept 11th: The Ghosts of Chinatown world premiere brings overlooked history to the concert stage
  Purchase Tickets here

• Wednesday, September 23rd, 12-1:30 PM, The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities presents:

  Dr. Venkatkrishnan is Assistant Professor of the History of Religion in South Asia at The University of Chicago Divinity School. He is an intellectual historian of South Asian religion. His first book, Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (OUP 2024), shows how popular religion shaped the everyday lives of Sanskrit scholars in early modern India. His current projects include Searching for Sarasvati, an alternate history of American Indology that bridges South Asian, African American, Asian American, and gender and sexuality studies.

  We will discuss Dr. Venkatkrishnan’s draft article, “Black and Brown in Babylon: Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s Divine Revelations.” As this is a draft, it should not be shared.

  Abstract:

  The last few years have seen a resurgence in the popularity of the avant-garde musician and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane, who also went by the name Swamini Turiyasangitananda. For all the attention to her life and music, her ideas remain poorly understood. Textual study was central to Coltrane’s spiritual explorations. Through her daily meditations, she testified to being divinely inspired to compose scriptural texts of her own, to produce written commentaries on a variety of religious sources, and to provide spiritual exercises for a community of students. She published these texts from her ashram in the hills of Southern California. They reveal an autodidact conversant in Sanskrit and Hindi and a reader who absorbed and interpreted specific religious texts. Yet few have been as patient as she was to work through their South Asian content. Through a close reading of her journal entries in Divine Revelations (1995) and other ephemera from the ashram, I provide detail into the South Asian forms of knowledge that Turiyasangitananda molded into her “freedom dreams.”

Please RSVP for lunch and to receive the reading.

• Thursday, September 24th, 4:10 PM, The Department of Classical and Religious Studies with cosponsorship by The Department of Asian Studies:

In critical studies of the humanities, we often think about the politics of knowledge, or, how
the fields we work in are implicated in systems of domination. To tell an intimate history of
these fields, however, is to move from the modes of thinking that undergird them to the people
who dwell in and around them. That means centering human desires, motivations,
contradictions, relationships, loss, fury, madness – in other words, what it feels like to
learn, whether within an institution or on its edges.
This talk is about one person on the margins of classical South Asian studies: my first Sanskrit
teacher, Dr. Sarasvati Mohan. Unreliable memories, archival fragments, and the texts we
read when I was a child form the basis of my attempt to understand how she transformed the
bitterness of unemployment into the gift of education.

• Thursday, September 24th, 5:30-7:30 pm at VCL Rothschild Satellite “Mid-Autumn Festival Celebration” sponsored by Asian Studies and VCLJoin us for an evening of mooncakes, Chinese food, cultural activities, and the chance to meet new friends while learning about Chinese culture!

• Friday, September 25, 2-4 PM, The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities presents:

Debashree Mukherjee (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University)
“Contract and Conjuring: Indian Film Exhibition in Colonial Fiji”

Abstract: In 1933, three Indian gentlemen sued the owners of Lilac Theatre, one of Fiji’s best-known movie palaces, after being evicted from the dress circle. The court ruled in their favor, upholding the movie ticket as a binding contractual agreement, while leaving the racial dimension of their exclusion largely unexamined. The ruling carries a deeper colonial irony: Indian presence in Fiji had itself been consolidated through another contractual form—the indenture agreement, or girmit—rhetorically defended as modern form of consensual migration even as it enabled coercive, racialized labor extraction. Indian talkie films entered this fraught arena as a form of conjuring, summoning visions of transformation and magic that bypassed the contractual grammar of the colonial-bureaucratic episteme altogether. In this talk, I trace the work of cinema between contract and conjuring, as it mediated liberal aspirations for equality alongside more unruly visions of diasporic longing.

Bio: Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is co-director of the Center for Comparative Media and edits the journal Screen. Author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), Debashree has several peer-reviewed publications on topics in feminist decolonial film historiography, eco-media, and critical visual theory. Her current research project, Tropical Machines, develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration from the 1830s onwards. Since 2022 Debashree has been running a collaborative project on Extractive Media, that considers the entanglements of media technologies with colonial and environmental extractivism.

• Thursday, October 1st, 6pm, Wilson 127 “Institutional NON-Neutrality”, cosponsored by Asian Studies

• Friday, October 2  “Race and Capitalism” Seminar At The Robert Penn Warren Center

Co-directors: Ajay Batra (English) and Maya Singhal (Asian Studies)

Asian Studies Working paper series, in conjunction with this seminar being lead by Mark Sanchez (Asian Studies)

The Race & Capitalism Seminar (R&C) is a forum for discussion about the role of race and other forms of difference in structuring economic inequality, social injustice, and the terrain of politics across time and space. Our programming fosters multi-disciplinary dialogue on a core set of inter-related themes and topics: the historical development and expansion of capitalism; colonialism and empire; free and unfree labor; race, ethnicity, and gender; and working-class politics and culture. To that end, we host lectures and workshop sessions that highlight the cutting-edge research of both Vanderbilt community members and visiting scholars. We welcome participants from the full range of disciplines across the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, including anthropology, ethnic and area studies, history, literary and cultural studies, and sociology.

Sign up for the Race & Capitalism Seminar mailing list

• Oct. 8/9 Guest Speaker Tara Fickle of Northwestern University
  Details forthcoming from the Department of English

• Friday, November 6th, 2 – 4 PM, The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities presents:
  

Pedagogy Workshop with Rebecca K. VanDiver (History of Art and Architecture, Vanderbilt University), Yucong Hao (Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University), and Isaac West (Communication Studies, Vanderbilt University).

Abstract: Please join us for a teaching practicum. We will begin with flash-talks by three Vanderbilt faculty (Yucong Hao: “AI Encounters”) and then open the floor for a wider conversation about teaching across media forms and their disciplines.

Bio: Yucong Hao is Mellon Assistant Professor of Asian Studies. Working at the intersection of comparative literature, media history, and performance studies, she studies the global connectivity, postcolonial engagement, and racial imagination in modern Chinese literature and media. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Global Storytelling, and International Comparative Literature.

• Nov 7, Nashville Public Library’s 2026 Literary Award Weekend featuring Ocean Vuong at Martin Luther King High School
  
  NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Nashville Public Library and Nashville Public Library Foundation are proud to honor poet and novelist Ocean Vuong as the 2026 Literary Award winner. Mr. Vuong will be recognized for his contributions to literature during the 22nd Anniversary Literary Award Weekend, presented by First Horizon Foundation. His work, which moves between poetry and fiction with equal force, makes him an ideal recipient for this award sponsored by Sandra Schatten Foundation. Tickets will be available beginning in September.Public Lecture is FREE – REGISTRATION BEGINS IN SEPTEMBER
  Free and open to the public
  Saturday, Nov. 7 at 10 a.m.
  Martin Luther King Jr. High School, 613 17th Ave. N., Nashville, Tenn. 37203
  Broadcast live on NECAT and streaming on NPL’s YouTube channel
  Sponsored by Dollar General and Carol and Bobby Frist

• Friday, December 4, 2-4 PM, The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Presents:
  
  Sunny Xiang (English, Yale University) Conspiratorial Thinking; Or, Breathing Together
  
  Abstract: My talk uses two seemingly disparate material cultural objects that have long preoccupied me—gas masks and bras—to build toward a theory of conspiracy based on the micropolitics and geopolitics of breath. In pursuing this etymological and elemental interpretation of conspiracy as “breathing together,” I also test out a method of conspiratorial reading that adduces hypothetical chemical intimacies in the absence of verifiable causalities. My archive is eclectic, though it is informed by my commitment to studying U.S. militarism and imperialism in a transpacific context. Components of this archive include: a Maidenform bra designed for WWII carrier pigeons; anti-Vietnam War performance art by Nam June Paik and Salvatore Martirano, respectively; NASA’s use of corset technologies in creating pressurized spacesuits; and an Emergency Bra (EBbra) that converts into a gas mask, which was inspired by the Chernobyl disaster and revitalized during the Covid pandemic. (I may not discuss all of these, but I will bring the EBbra to show you!) Through such examples, I hope to develop a critical vocabulary for redescribing the motifs of exposure and enclosure that underpin colonial conceptions of atmospheric harm and protection. Whereas these boundary-asserting motifs presuppose an antipathy between a vulnerable white body and a hostile environment, I wonder if that a more elemental and relational theory of conspiratorial thinking/breathing can help us devise other blueprints for living in and with chemical and colonial violence.Bio: Sunny Xiang is a professor of English and American Studies at Yale​ who uses wide-ranging aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials to study U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific. She is especially interested in how historical norms for perceiving race and gender have interacted with the sensory economy of colonial violence and militarized security. Her book Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War was published in 2020.

• Thursday, February 4th, 2027
  Sarah Wang visit for New Skin
  In partnership with English

Past Events