Categorie: News

We are pleased to announce an upcoming Guest Lecture hosted by the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies on 12 December 2024 at 1:30 pm CET in a hybrid format:

• in person: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Camelot 3.30, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
• online: send an email to rosina.pastore@ugent.be for the registration

Title of the Lecture: “Exploring the creative world of Ācārya Hemacandra”
Speaker: Prof. Sreenath VS (IIT Madras)

Through this talk we will delve into the Jaina contributions to aesthetics in the work of Hemachandra.

Sreenath VS, Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, IIT Madras, is a visiting scholar at the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies this December, and his lecture is part of this appointment.

The Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) and the Center for Research on Culture and Gender (CRCG) are pleased to host Prof. Anandita Pan from IIT Hyderabad, India, for the upcoming seminar titled “Justice for Whom? Gender, Caste, and Intersectionality”.

The seminar

The topic of gender justice must begin with the inevitable question: what gender is justice? Linda R. Hirshman asks, “Is the law male?” Hirshman’s question points out how the “maleness” of the legal system affects every woman.

Prof. Pan’s lecture will focus on gender justice through the lens of intersectionality to emphasize the necessity of recognizing the interconnectedness as well as differences among categories. Intersectionality challenges traditional notions of justice that treat social categories as separate or distinct.

Instead, it calls for an approach to justice that acknowledges how various systems of oppression (e.g., sexism, casteism, classism) intersect and compound one another. Achieving gender justice, therefore, requires addressing these interconnected forms of oppression holistically. 

About the speaker

Anandita Pan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, IIT Hyderabad. Her areas of interest are Feminist theory, Gender Studies, and Dalit Feminism. She is the author of Mapping Dalit Feminism: Towards An Intersectional Standpoint (Sage-Stree, 2020) and Aesthetics in India: Transitions and Transformations (Orient Blackswan, 2023). She is the recipient of the President’s Award for Best paper at the IAWS conference, 2020.

Whereabouts

• Date and time: 9 December 2024, 12h00 – 13h30 CET
• Address: Ghent University – Campus Tweekerken, Room 1.10, Sint-Pietersplein 7 – 9000 Ghent
• Online: Click here to register and join on Microsoft Teams

On Wednesday 27th November, Prof. Seema Chauhan from Trinity College Dublin will be guest of the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) and will deliver a talk titled “Re-examining the emergence of Jain householders”.
We warmly invite everyone to attend!

The talk will be in person and no prior registration is required.

• Location: Camelot 3.30, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent.
• Time: 2 pm CET.

We are thrilled to announce that on 26th October 2024 Prof. Eva De Clercq was honoured with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award 2024. The award was presented by the Indian Ambassador to Belgium, Mr Saurabh Kumar, in recognition of her extraordinary contributions to strengthening academic ties between Indian and Belgian institutions in the field of Indian Studies.

The event marked a significant moment in the academic calendar, celebrating not only Prof. De Clercq’s outstanding achievements but also the enduring friendship between India and Belgium.

 We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Prof. De Clercq for this well-deserved recognition and look forward to witnessing her continued impact on the global academic community.

In collaboration with the University of Birmingham and the Arihanta Institute, the Jaina Studies group at Ghent University is once again co-organiser of the lecture series “Dialogues in European Jain Studies”.

The event series features a variety of topics and methodologies ranging from philosophical, anthropological, historical, philological, and applied approaches to Jain Studies, and more. All the lectures are held online and are intended to be accessible in times zones ranging between Europe, North America, Africa, and India.

For more information on the programme and for registration: https://dialogues.arihantainstitute.org/.

On 10th October, Mr Saurabh Kumar, Ambassador of India to Belgium and Luxembourg, and to the European Union, accompanied by Mr Venkateswaran Narayanan, First Secretary Press, Information and Culture visited Ghent University to meet the Rector, Prof Rik Van de Walle,  as well as the Indian Professors working at UGhent at different departments, and the research team at the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies.

H.E. the Ambassador expressed his admiration for the research work being done and learnt more about current and future activities in collaboration with Indian research institutes.

We are thrilled to announce that the The Gandhāra Corpora Project, the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies, and the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies will host a lecture by Professor Nicholas Witkowski from the University of San Diego.

• Title: Monastic Monsters: Historicizing Outcaste Characters in the Grotesquerie of Indian Buddhist Literature
• Date and Time: October 3, 2024, at 4pm (CET)
• Location: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn, faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent

For more information, including the full abstract and bio of the speaker, see here.

• co-lecturers-in-charge: Dr. Rosina Pastore and Dr. Paride Stortini
• programme director: Prof. Dr. Eva De Clercq

• lecturer-in-charge: Dr. Anna Sokolova
• programme director: Prof. Dr. Eva De Clercq

Dr. Udayakumar S., Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru has just joined the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) of Ghent University as a Visiting Scholar with a research stay fellowship granted by VLIRUOS.

Dr. Udaykumar is an ethnoarchaeologist and a member of the Nilgiri Archaeological Project. During his time at Ghent University, he will be working on the project “Kota women’s technical knowledge of traditional pottery-making” and delve into methodologies for petrographic analysis.

Welcome Uday!