Schedule & Panels
Click on the following panel titles for more information about each panel, pre-recorded videos, and suggested resources specific to each panel. Please register in advance for the synchronous discussion portions for each panel at the registration links below. We look forward to seeing you there!
Note: Upon event registration, you will receive the password required to access all pre-recorded presentations of the symposium.
- Symposium Introduction & Collections, Collecting, and Display: Individual and Institutional Collectors Across Time and Space
- South Asian Music Ensemble Spring Concert
- The Arabian Sea and Western Indian Ocean: Labor, Caste, and Community
- Early Cinema: Scholars and Artists in Conversation
- Across the Bay of Bengal: Interwoven Voices, Lives, and Images
- Fields and Forms: Legacies of Collecting and the Forms of Knowledge in Ethnomusicology and Islamic Art
- Epilogue
View the Interwoven Capstone 2021 Events Calendar and/or add it to your calendar application.
Symposium Introduction & Collections, Collecting, and Display: Individual and Institutional Collectors Across Time and Space
Friday, May 14
10:00 – 11:45 AM (CDT)
via Zoom
Symposium Introduction
Opening Comments
Philip Bohlman, Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Department of Music and the Humanities in the College, University of Chicago
Performance: "Peshkaar in Raga Chandrakauns"
Ameera Nimjee, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, School of Music and Asian Studies, University of Puget Sound (kathak dance)
Bertie Kibreah, Programming Coordinator, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago (tabla)
Tomal Hossain, PhD Student in Ethnomusicology, Department of Music, University of Chicago (harmonium)
Collections, Collecting, and Display
Indian Ocean images and sonic presentations have been prized from millennia prior to the Common Era through to the present. They have been collected and stored as sonic memories and as physical objects, finding homes in various locations within the region and as migrants to elsewhere in the world. They have been transmitted across generations and eras as revered original art or artifacts and for more than a century as embodied in new media. This panel explores practices of collecting, transmission, ownership, and presentation of sound and visual objects.
Panelists
Niall Atkinson (Introduction), Associate Professor of Art History, Romance Languages and Literature, and the College, University of Chicago
James Nye (Introduction), Bibliographer for Southern Asia, retired, and Associate in the Humanities Division, University of Chicago
Ronald Radano (Panel Keynote), Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Studies and Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Zoé Headley, Chargée de recherche, Co-directrice du CEIAS, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Kenneth X. Robbins, Psychiatrist, Collector of South Asian art, and Independent Scholar
South Asian Music Ensemble Spring Concert
Friday, May 14
7:00 – 8:30 PM (CDT)
via Zoom
Concert Details
Join the University of Chicago’s South Asian Music Ensemble for their annual Spring Concert featuring devotional and classical numbers in various South Asian languages punctuated by collaborations with guest artists on a 1914 ballet by Hazrat Inayat Khan, John Coltrane’s “Naima,” a khayal-inspired number from the recent Amazon Prime Indian web series Bandish Bandits, and “Peace Song”—written and composed to premiere on this occasion.
The Arabian Sea and Western Indian Ocean: Labor, Caste, and Community
Tuesday, May 18
10:00 – 11:30 AM (CDT)
via Zoom
The scholars on this panel draw together the interwoven themes of architecture, music, photography, and literature. Their work on memory, caste, labor, worship, space, and community addresses mobility and exchange between eastern Africa and western India.
Panelists
Anna Schultz (Introduction/Moderator), Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago
Jazmin Graves, Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Kaley Mason, Assistant Professor of Music, Lewis and Clark College
Ameera Nimjee, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, School of Music and Asian Studies, University of Puget Sound
Pushkar Sohoni (Panel Keynote), Associate Professor and Chair, Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune
Early Cinema: A Roundtable Conversation
Thursday, May 20
10:00 – 11:30 AM (CDT)
via Zoom
This roundtable conversation explores cinematography, music, dance, cinemas, and audience reception from the era of silent films through the first decades of talkies. Consideration of film as art and artifact is interwoven with reflection on cinema’s profound impact on Indian Ocean societies. The 1931 film Diler Jigar with original musical accompaniment created for this symposium provides a unique resource for the roundtable discussion.
Panelists
James Nye (Introduction/Moderator), Bibliographer for Southern Asia, retired, and Associate in the Humanities Division, University of Chicago
Sascha Ebeling, Associate Professor, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago
Usha Iyer, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University
Bertie Kibreah, Programming Coordinator, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, The University of Chicago
Hari Krishnan, Professor, Dance Department, Wesleyan University
Across the Bay of Bengal: Interwoven Voices, Lives, and Images
Tuesday, May 25
10:00 – 11:30 AM (CDT)
via Zoom
This panel explores performance, visual, and sonic traditions from southeastern India and Southeast Asia across and within their heterogeneous communities. Speakers on this panel address aspects of the long and intertwined histories that both join and distinguish people, ideas, and embodied cultural forms as expressions of these interwoven communities.
Panelists
Anna Seastrand (Introduction/Moderator), Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota
Catherine Asher, Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, University of Minnesota
Whitney Cox, Associate Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
Madhuvanti Ghosh, Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, Himalayan, and Islamic Art, Art Institute of Chicago
Davesh Soneji, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Emma Natalya Stein, Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution
Jim Sykes, Associate Professor of Music, Department of Music, University of Pennsylvania
Fields and Forms: Legacies of Collecting and the Forms of Knowledge in Ethnomusicology and Islamic Art
Friday, May 28
9:00 – 11:30 AM (CDT)
via Zoom
This keynote panel draws together two of the finest collections in the world, the Humboldt Forum of Berlin and the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Speakers explore how the collections and their interpretations are themselves interwoven across time and space, across modes of knowledge production, and from the present to the past.
Panelists (Keynotes Discussion)
Niall Atkinson (Introduction/Moderator), Associate Professor of Art History, Romance Languages and Literature, and the College, University of Chicago
Philip Bohlman (Moderator), Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Department of Music and the Humanities in the College, University of Chicago
Anna Seastrand (Moderator), Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota
Navina Najat Haidar (Keynote), Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Lars-Christian Koch (Keynote), Director of the Ethnological Museum Berlin and Head of Collections for the Humboldt Forum of Berlin
Performance: Peshkaar in Raga Chandrakauns (encore)
Ameera Nimjee, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, School of Music and Asian Studies, University of Puget Sound (kathak dance)
Bertie Kibreah, Programming Coordinator, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago (tabla)
Tomal Hossain, PhD Student in Ethnomusicology, Department of Music, University of Chicago (harmonium)
Panelists (Concluding Discussion)
Niall Atkinson (Introduction/Moderator),Associate Professor of Art History, Romance Languages and Literature, and the College, University of Chicago
Philip Bohlman (Moderator), Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Department of Music and the Humanities in the College, University of Chicago
James Nye, Bibliographer for Southern Asia, retired, and Associate in the Humanities Division, University of Chicago
Laura Ring, Librarian for Southern Asia and Anthropology, University of Chicago Library
Anna Schultz, Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago
Anna Seastrand, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota
Epilogue
Continued Reflection, Conversation, and Resources:
Interwoven Themes and Variations
During the month of June, the Interwoven project will keep its website open as a forum for continued reflection on and conversation about the capstone event as well as the addition of recorded collection tours. The Interwoven website will allow participants to address the capstone themes and formulate them as a series of variations that will be especially critical for further study of the sonic and visual in the Indian Ocean Worlds. Establishing an active site for reflection and conversation in the month following the capstone event, moreover, has particular importance in spring 2021, when many of our participants are working under especially challenging circumstances during India’s second pandemic wave and concomitant global lockdowns. Securing a space in which to hear the voices of our international partners respond to Interwoven and to view additional tours of collections is of critical importance at this moment in time.