Spring 2016

Dear Friends,

Welcome back to Berkeley and best wishes for a happy new year. The coming semester at the Center is as busy as ever full of lectures, performances, and workshops, and we hope you can join us.

We are delighted to announce that our first major event will be the 2016 Chowdhury Center Distinguished Lecture by Nobel Laureate and pre-eminent economist, Dr. Amartya Sen. Dr. Sen's lecture will take place on Sunday, March 13, 2016 at 4 pm and is free and open to the public. Please join us in welcoming him back to Berkeley. Further details about the event may be found in the box on the right. 

Other Chowdhury Center events this semester include:

For those of you who were not able to attend our Fall events, please visit the Videos section on our website to view videos and podcasts of past programs. Recently added are the lecture on Communities in Transition by  Prof. M. Omar Rahman, the Vice Chancellor, Independent University, Bangladesh; Dr. Mousumi Banerjee's delightful performance of songs/kobita ​of Tagore; the discussion between Political Scientists, Ali Riaz and Rounaq Jahan and Anthropologist, Dina Siddiqi on the erosion of secularism in Bangladesh; and Assistant Professor of English, Dr. Poulomi Saha's talk on Freud, Tagore, and Imagining the Female Nationalist Subject in Colonial Bengal. Video-recordings of the opening remarks made by Munir Quddus, President of BDI and Sanchita Saxena, Director of the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at the annual conference of the Bangladesh Development Initiative are also available on the Center's website. 

As part of the Center's focus on creating opportunities for collaborative research between UC Berkeley and top universities in Bangladesh, four UCB faculty; Prof. Lawrence Cohen (Anthropology), Prof. Raka Ray (Sociology), Asst. Prof. Poulomi Saha (English), and Prof. Allan Smith (Epidemiology), spent a week at BRAC University this past winter and conducted workshops on undergraduate teaching and research methodology as well as engaged with BRAC faculty on collaborative research. Prof. Lawrence Cohen's workshop titled, Rethinking Medical Anthropology and its Methodology, included discussions on the body in modernization theory and explored ways in which those theories could be integrated into participants’ research projects. He also conducted an interactive session for faculty members on methodologies of teaching sensitive topics such as race, gender, and sexuality. An expert on gender and feminist theory, inequality and emerging middle classes, Prof. Raka Ray's workshop entitled, Searching for the Middle Classes, raised the question of whether the middle class was an economical or a cultural category and explored the politics of class and gender within the emerging middle classes in South Asia. Prof. Poulomi Saha, Assistant Prof. of English conducted a workshop on Theory of Methodology in which she looked at the application of critical theory to disciplines such as English and Anthropology that are engaged in analyzing culture through texts. She also focused on the concept of interdisciplinarity and the need for going across disciplines in pursuit of research objectives. Professor Allan Smith, a global expert on public health, conducted an intensive workshop on arsenic contamination in drinking water in Bangladesh. Highlighting the urgency of the problem and its implications on future generations, the workshop focused on new areas of research on the effects of arsenic contamination on pregnant mothers.