Dear Colleagues and Friends,
We are delighted to announce the first academic retreat of the Mithila Studies Network that will take place virtually during the week of May 20–24, 2024. Our retreat will introduce interested participants to our network’s collaborative research projects and offer support and mentorship to new research projects on Mithila Studies. This retreat will pave the way forward for an in-person research workshop at the Australian National University, Canberra, tentatively planned for September or October 2025.
Mithila Studies Network was founded by Coralynn V. Davis, Christopher L. Diamond and Pranav Prakash to cultivate cutting-edge research and scholarship on Mithila-related subjects with a view to making lasting contributions to the broader humanities, social sciences and arts. As our inaugural venture, we organized a day-long hybrid symposium at the 50th Annual Conference on South Asia, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, on October 19, 2022. Building on the success of our symposium, we have edited a special issue for Asian Ethnology, which initiates new lines of inquiry within Mithila Studies while also illustrating the productive ways in which research on Mithila Studies can transform the broader academy. To learn more about our research work and academic outreach, please visit our website: www.mithilastudies.org.
Our virtual retreat this May is designed as an opportunity for interested participants—those with whom we’ve already engaged and those we have yet to meet—to develop their own research projects on Mithila Studies and to seek any kind of support and assistance from our collaborative network. Over the course of approximately two hours in retreat, we expect to share our individual research ideas, brainstorm thematic, methodological and theoretical overlaps, and consider scholarly formats together. Please note that our retreat is not a venue for presenting academic papers.
If you wish to participate in our retreat, please register using this online form by the deadline of May 1, 2024.
If you know of anyone who would benefit from our planned retreat and research network, please forward our email to them. We would very much appreciate your help in spreading the word. If you have questions about our retreat or network, please reach out to us at contact@mithilastudies.org. We are eagerly looking forward to your participation in the retreat.
Sincerely,
Coralynn, Christopher, Pranav
Coralynn V. Davis
Presidential
Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Bucknell University, USA
Christopher L. Diamond
Lecturer in Hindi, Australian National University, Australia