Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

Visiting Scholar Dr. Iftekhar Iqbal

Dr. Iftekhar Iqbal conducts a research stay at Seminar for South Asian Studies from July to August 2019.

Iftekhar Iqbal (PhD, Cambridge) is Associate Professor of History and International Studies at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. Previously, he worked at the University of Dhaka. Iqbal´s research interests include intellectual history of South Asia and Asian environmental history.

Iqbal´s first monograph, The Bengal Delta (Palgrave, 2010), examines agrarian economy and wellbeing of colonial Bangladesh and West Bengal from a political-ecological perspective. The book received Honorable Mention by the Bernard S. Cohn Prize Committee of Association for Asian Studies and a Book Prize from University Grants Commission of Bangladesh. Iqbal is holder of Georg Forster Fellowship of Humboldt Foundation (2012-13) and British Academy Visiting Fellowship (2008). He  serves as Chairman of the Asialoka Trust, a Dhaka-based non-profit think-tank, and sits on the international advisory board of South Asia: A Journal of South Asian Studies and Conservation and Society.

As a visiting fellow (July-August 2019) at the Institut for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, being sponsored by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Iqbal continues to work on a book project on the Tibetan-Himalayan rivers as a site of transregional mobility of human and non-human actors as well as commerce and commodities. 

A list of publications by Iftekhar Iqbal is accessible here:

https://ubd.academia.edu/IftekharIqbal

Visiting Scholar Dr. Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska

Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska (PhD) is an assistant professor and supervisor of Asian Studies in Collegium Civitas, Warsaw. Her PhD thesis entitled Political Conditions of Democracy in India and Pakistan - Comparative Analysis (in Polish), defended at the Polish Academy of Sciences, was based on her own research, conducted among Pakistani and Indian political elites. Agnieszka made a monthly study visit to SciencesPo in Paris (Project co-funded by the European Social Fund). In Collegium Civitas, she teaches the following courses: Asia and its Regions in the Contemporary World, International Relations Workshop (in Polish), BA Seminar, Trade Aid and Develoment, Strategic Games (in English). Agnieszka also lectures at Warsaw University (Open University). She presented papers at international conferences dedicated to South Asia (25th European Conference on South Asian Studies, Paris, July 2018; International Conference on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Political, Economic and Social Perspective, University of the Pubjab, Lahore, Septemer 2017; Educating Women for Peace and Democracy, European Parliament, Brussels, May 2017). Agnieszka is a member of the European Association for South Asian Studies.

Visiting Scholar Prof. Dr. Vandana Joshi

Visiting Scholar Dr. Karl Dirk Voss

Visiting Scholar Dr. Chris Moffat

Dr. Chris Moffat, Lecturer in South Asian and Global History, Queen Mary University of London, UK

I am a political and intellectual historian of modern South Asia with an interest in the shape and form of history’s ‘public life’ across the broader postcolonial world. To this end, my work engages both the philosophy and anthropology of the discipline. I joined Queen Mary in 2015, having completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2014.

My research focuses on questions of historical methodology, especially where the discipline of history grapples with alternative conceptions of time and space, the interruptive influence of the dead, and the fraying or tangled threads of memory. I have written extensively on the Indian revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), tracing his continuing political potential into the twenty-first century and asking what it means to take such revenant figures seriously in the history of political thought.

I have a consonant interest in alternative or dissident commemorative practices, particularly as they relate to public space, public art and the politics of archival and architectural preservation.

Visiting Scholar Dr. Simon Layton

Prof. Dr. Anuradha Roy

Works focus on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Bengal. Specializes in the life of the Bengali bhadralok (middle-class literati) and bhadramahila (the women of the bhadralok family). Written in both Bengali and English. Quite a few books on Bengal Marxism, including two in English, both published in 2014 – Bengal Marxism: Early Discourses and Debates and Cultural Communism in Bengal, 1936-1952. Also authored Nationalism as Poetic Discourse in Nineteenth Century Bengal. Edited two big collections of nationalist songs and poems for the literary academies of the province of West Bengal and of India, covering the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries respectively.

Interested also in Gandhian social activism in Bengal. Contemplates a combination of Marx, Gandhi and Tagore for formulating an ideology for a better world.

Prof. Dr. Sudeshna Banerjee

After doing her Bachelor of Arts with honours in History from Presidency College, Calcutta, she did her Masters in History at the University of Calcutta. A Commonwealth Scholarship tenable in the UK enabled her to get her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Sudeshna Banerjee started her teaching career as a guest lecturer in Presidency College, Calcutta, even while she was an UGC Junior Research Fellow. She joined City College, Calcutta, as a full-time lecturer in February 1986. In September that year she joined Jadavpur University as a lecturer. In 1994 she was promoted to the post of senior lecturer by Jadavpur University. Readership was conferred on her in 1999. She became an associate professor with the nomenclature of the post of reader being changed to that of associate professor by an order of the Government of West Bengal. Additionally, she served as the Head of the Department of History, Jadavpur University, from 01.04.2010 to 31.03. 2012.

Prof. Dr. Vandana Joshi

Vandana Joshi

 

Dr. Vandana Joshi teaches at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. She learnt German language, literature and history, Indian history and gender history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and University of Delhi before coming to Germany as a DAAD fellow in 1995. She obtained her doctorate in 2001 from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Women and Gender (ZIFG), Technical University, Berlin, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Karin Hausen.

 

Since then she has received several honours and research awards such as the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, Erasmus Mundus Visiting Fellowship, Charles Wallace India Trust Grant, MPI Geschichte Visiting Fellowship and recently, the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. Her ongoing research, “Wartime Sexuality: State Policies and Social Practices in Germany and Britain in WWII 1939-45” focuses on unwanted sexual relations between native women and prisoners of war or Black American GIs in World War Two, an embarrassing fact for the two nation-empires and an everyday lived reality for ‘the many' who retained their zest and love of life in an atmosphere of hatred.

 

Maj. Gen. (retd.) Shaukat Iqbal

Maj. Gen. (retd.) Shaukat Iqbal ist von Mai bis Juni 2015 Gast am Seminar für Südasien-Studien und hält die Vorlesungsreihe: The Tribal Areas of Pakistan and their Role in the Political Situation in the Region.

Maj. Gen. (retd.) Shaukat Iqbal has served in Pakistan Army for 40 Years.

Has experience of fighting War on Terrorism and serving in Kashmir. He has also commanded Division of Nuclear Forces. He is a graduate of Pakistan Staff College, National Defence College and German Fuerungsakademie Hamburg. He was declared as best officer in German Staff College and was awarded Clausewitz Honor and Shorn Horst Prize.

In civil education he is Masters in Strategic Studies, Masters in International Affairs, Masters in Military Sciences and presently a student of PhD in International Affairs. He Served in  diplomatic mission in Germany, Austria, Poland for a long time and has the distinction of travelling to more than 50 countries. He also served in Saudi Arabia and China on military missions for long time. He participated in many workshops and security seminars of West Europe, East Europe, Middle East and Far East.

He is author of two books:

1. The New Great Game and Security Challenges for Pakistan and

2. Turmoil in Muslim World – A moment of soul searching

 

Soham Das Gupta

Herr Soham Das Gupta ist von Juni bis Oktober 2014 Gast am Seminar für Südsaien-Studien.

Soham Das Gupta

He was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt-University, Berlin, from June to October 2014. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D in Jadavpur University. His research deals with the  British theories and practices of "small wars" in the North-West Frontier of British India between 1849-1913. The chief focus of the research is the patterns of wars waged by the British colonial masters against the frontier tribes. The engagements between the British colonial masters and tribesmen of the 'volatile frontier' ranged from 'butcher and bolt' expedition to 'winning the hearts and minds'.Moreover, here is an endevour to explore any shift & continuity in waging war in this particular region in recent times. Furthermore, here is an attempt to engage in the onging debate on the “new wars”  by trying to  see  ‘how new are these “new wars”?'

 

He has completed his M.Phil (in 2012), M.A.(in 2010, First Class) and B.A.(in 2008, First Class) in History from Jadavpur University.

 

Sayantani Adhikary

Sayantani Adhikary (D.O.B - 28.08.1980) is currently working as Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studied, Humboldt University, Berlin, from April 2013 to August 2013. Sayantani completed her Masters in History from Jadavpur University with First class in 2004 and taught as a Guest Lecturer in Asutosh College from 2004 to 2009. She is currently doing her Ph.d on the topic titled “Politics of Physical Culture in Colonial Bengal, 1867-1947” under Dr. Sudeshna Banerjee, Department of History, Jadavpur University.

Her PhD dissertation focuses upon the interface between emerging national consciousness in colonial Bengal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the world of physical culture. The thesis does not miss the coincidence between the bhadralok’s interest in physical culture and the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism. But, while recognizing the connection between the eagerness of the bhadralok nationalism for physical culture as a reaction to the colonial ascription of effeminacy on the middle class educated Bengali male, the thesis also seeks to raise the question as to whether historically this was the only determinant of the bhadralok enthusiasm for physical culture from the end of the nineteenth century. Secondly, the thesis identifies that the world of physical culture was a highly diversified sphere. The dissertation therefore tries to examine the different ideological positions that were at work in the revived world of physical culture.