About

The Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University was founded in 1989 by Professor Sugata Bose and has been the focal point for scholarship on South Asia in the New England area for three and a half decades. Professor Ayesha Jalal has served as the guiding spirit and Director of the Center since 2001. Even before the Center's formal founding, a major international conference was convened in December 1986 on "South Asia and World Capitalism", which resulted in an edited volume published in 1990. On the eve of the 50^th anniversary of independence and partition, the Tufts Center hosted another conference, which yielded the volume titled Nationalism, Democracy and Development edited by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal in 1997. Tufts has continued to be a vibrant venue for serious scholarship on South Asia in the twenty-first century. Seminars and conferences at the Center have served as the basis for recent books titled Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism and Kashmir and the Future of South Asia, both edited and introduced by Bose and Jalal.

The Center has hosted major lectures by renowned scholars of South Asia, including Ranajit Guha, Romila Thapar, Amartya Sen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Christopher Bayly, Sara Suleri and others. It has been the intellectual home of graduate students and undergraduates in the Department of History interested in South Asia. Revised versions of doctoral dissertations by Semanti Ghosh, Chitralekha Zutshi, Prachi Deshpande, Neeti Nair, Neilesh Bose, Sarah Waheed and Shahla Hussain and a senior thesis by Aniket De have been published by leading university presses. In 2022-2023 the Center jointly organized with Harvard's Asia Center and Weatherhead Center a conference on "Empire, Nation, Federation: South Asia's Freedom in Global Perspective".