SALA Conference Program 2009

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For the past few years I've been posting the program of the annual South Asian Literary Association conference here. I won't be at t...

From "Pinocchio" to "Astro-Boy": Fairy Tales and Sci-Fi

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In the spring I'm co-teaching a course with a scholar visiting from Japan, "The Edges of the Human: Bodies, Animals, and Machines i...

Nose-Piercing, Utah, and a Big Oops (Not Mine) [Updated]

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On Thursday, I spoke to an AP reporter about a story in Utah last week, expressing some views about a girl in middle school in Utah who got ...

New and Forthcoming Publications

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I was happy to see that an essay I wrote for the journal Symploke recently became available via Project Muse: “Anonymity, Authorship, and Bl...

Fall Teaching: "Global English" and "Converts and Rebels"

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This post is partly inspired by Tim Burke's recent post , asking why more web-oriented academics don't post drafts of their syllabi ...

"I Wanna Be Like You": The Jungle Book, Revisited

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Being a parent gives you a chance to go back over the children's stories you grew up with and even, in some cases, learn about new ones....

"Victory Becomes the Defeat of the Good": Ram Narayan Kumar

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I recently learned of the death of Ram Narayan Kumar , an Indian human rights activist, in Nepal. Kumar, who died of natural causes, is well...

Vinay Lal, "The Other Indians"

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We finally have a pedagogically useful introductory book on the history of the South Asian American community, Vinay Lal’s The Other Indians...

A Little on Gauhar Jaan

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I was doing some research this morning on an unrelated topic, when I randomly came across the name Gauhar Jaan, one of the great recording a...

Shameless Literary Tourism in Dublin: Bloomsday 2009

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It’s rather striking how much of a commodity James Joyce is in Dublin; there’s nothing comparable to it in any American city. You hear menti...

'I Hope You Feel Better Soon': Hello From Ireland

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We've been in Ireland for a little holiday. Some of it is a little bit of long overdue literary tourism around Dublin (about which I mig...

Review: "Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance"

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Global Bollywood is an academic anthology, but it contains several essays that might be of interest to lay readers who are fans of Hindi fi...