Nancy Um (Binghamton University) showcases her research, anticipating our DH workshop with her the next day. To learn more about Prof. Um and her work in Art History, look here.
Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
In the first of two events on Digital Scholarship in Asian Studies, Paul Vierthaler (Leiden University), discusses his research on the authorship of the seventeenth century anonymous novel from China, The Plum in the Golden Vase.
Held on 31 January 2019 (with the generous support of the Luce Foundation).
The Once and Future City-Center: Urban Aspirations in Mumbai’s Periphery
Nalasopara is one of the fastest growing neighbourhoods in one of the fastest growing municipalities in India today. This peri-urban area in the northwestern periphery of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is a key district of the recently inaugurated Vasai-Virar City Municipal Corporation (VVCMC). The new Vasai-Virar City is, in fact, ‘old’. This region in north Konkan, on the western coast of India, less than fifty miles north of the city of Mumbai, is the site of two historic port cities, Sopara (today, Nalasopara) and Bassein (today, Vasai). Writing about this city of over a million people sometime in the later decades of 1 CE, the anonymous author of the Periplus Erythraei Maris refers to Sopara as ‘a bustling port city of many hundreds of people and the capital of the Konkan between 500 BCE and 1100 CE.’
Until recently, revenue records, following colonial bookkeeping practice, categorized this region as pre-dominantly agricultural in character. In the past couple of decades, however, Nalasopara developed a reputation for being the least expensive ‘urban’ real estate destination in the MMR. The Development Authority’s Draft Regional Plan for MMR 2016-2036 proposes to develop Nalasopara into a ‘Growth Centre’ by 2036. This presentation will investigate Nalasopara’s many urban pasts, and its imagined and contested future by analyzing the contrasting interests and aspirations of its constituencies. It will outline the processes by which the planners’ imagination, the politician’s ambitions, the migrant communities’ anxieties, and the locals’ assertions come together to undermine the state’s development vision.
Held on 11 November 2018 (Sponsored by the NYUAD GAI with the generous support of the Luce Foundation).