Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS)

As part of the 60th anniversary of the South Asia Institute, the exhibition "Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation" and an accompanying symposium will take place from May 28th till July 31st, 2022 at the Völkerkundemuseum, Heidelberg (VPST).The exhibition was curated by Monica Juneja (HCTS) and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University) in collaboration with Robert Bitsch (VPST). You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition and reception on Friday, May 27, starting at 18:00. A guided walk through the show with the artist will be part of the event. A day-long symposium of scholars discussing this body of work from different disciplinary perspectives will take place on Saturday, May 28, from 9:00 to 18:45, also at the Völkerkundemuseum (VPST). Please register for the symposium using the following e-mail: info@vkm-vpst.de. The program of the symposium is available here and the poster here.

This Lecture Series, which considers both historical research and artistic takes on historic events, provides a forum for a dialogue on the apocalyptic moment of the conquest and early colonization of Latin America. It takes place approximately biweekly, on Thursdays, 12-14, during the summer term of 2022. It will be accompanied by film screenings, musical and dramatic performances, and literary readings. [Poster]

Jointly offered by four universities ( the University of Heidelberg, the University of Warsaw, the University of Heidelberg, the University of Milan and Charles University, Prague), this course aims to provide students with an inter-disciplinary and comparative understanding of different regions of the world and of current problems affecting them. It draws on the diverse multidisciplinary expertise of four European universities, but focuses especially on cultural, International Relations and historical perspectives. The course will equip students with the conceptual and analytical tools to analyse events and dynamics of a global nature, while at the same time drawing upon a series of very concrete case studies. More details are here.

Science fiction from China, poetry from Japan, novels from India: in the coming months, the TRANSLASIEN project at CATS will produce a series of literary translations from Asian languages into German. The project has awarded a total of eleven stipends for projects that will translate literary works from five South and East Asian languages, all taught at CATS: Chinese, Japanese, Dari, Urdu, and Hindi. The literary translators will work at CATS in the coming months. Excerpts of their work will later be presented in public readings and be available on the TRANSLASIEN website.

In the coming semesters the CATSFORUM is reinvigorated as to give all CATS researchers the opportunity to discuss research questions. In the CATSFORUM the CATS community shall come together in a bottom-up and interactive way in order to present existing research projects, individual research foci, or even initial research ideas and sketches that are still in development. Presentations could be as short as 5 minutes or as long as 15 minutes, followed by a brief discussion. The CATSFORUM is designed as a 3-hour event, which also offers the opportunity for individual discussions during the coffee and catering breaks. The next two dates for the CATSFORUM have been fixed. They are Friday, 24 June (summer semester 2022), 15-18h and Friday, 20 January (winter semester 2022/23), 10-13h in each case.