Thursday, September 24th. 4:10 pm in Cohen 203.
“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.”
Sponsored by the Department of Classical and Religious Studies & the Department of Asian Studies.