Persian | South Asia at UB

Current UB undergraduate and graduate students are invited to apply for funding to attend intensive summer language programs offered by the American Institute of Indian Studies. Applications for funding will be evaluated by UB Asian Studies Program faculty and staff. Rustgi South Asian Language Awards support the full cost of tuition and roundtrip airfare to India. An additional subvention for living expenses may also be available based on funding levels. We anticipate awarding two student awards for summer 2018.

About the Language Program

Participants are expected to devote their energies to activities that will increase their proficiency in all skills—speaking, listening, reading, and writing. For eight weeks at each AIIS language center, there will be at least four hours a day of classroom instruction and individual tutorials with regular out-of-class assignments requiring interaction with community members. Attendance is mandatory in class as well as at other activities such as cultural visits, films, and plays. There is special emphasis on connecting with the local speech community and self-management of learning. Participants are encouraged to identify and prioritize their language learning needs and keep track of their language development. Students are encouraged to stay with host families. Note that this is not a research program. Participants are expected to devote all their energies to learning the target language. For more information, please visit the AIIS Language Programs website.

Eligibility

Full-time enrollment as an undergraduate or graduate student at the University of Buffalo in good academic standing at the time of application
Those applying for Bangla, Hindi, Tamil, and Urdu must have completed at least one year of language study before attending the program. Two years of prior language study are required for Sanskrit. Applicants for Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, and Kannada may apply at all levels, including beginning. Applications for other South Asian languages (Pali/Prakrit and Mughal Persian) will also be considered.
At the time of application for this award, applicants must have already applied to an AIIS summer language program. The deadline for submitting materials to AIIS is December 31, 2017.

Criteria for Selection

Awards will be based on academic merit and seriousness of purpose
The applicant agrees to be an ambassador for Asian Studies at UB by sending occasional posts and photos of their experiences while in-country for use on the Asian Studies Program’s social media and website. The applicant must also be willing to talk with other students about their study abroad experience upon returning to UB.
The applicant’s plans to enroll in additional South Asia-related courses including a required 1-credit South Asia seminar in the fall semester following their return from India.
Preference will be given to students seeking to learn “critical need” languages (Bangla, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu).
Preference will be given to students who can demonstrate that they have also applied for the Critical Language Scholarship(deadline November 15, 2017) and/or Boren Awards (UB internal deadline November 15, 2017)

Required Application Materials

1) Completed AIIS Language Application in a single PDF file including

Application form (available as both a word and pdf document on the AIIS web site);
One-page (less than 500-word) statement of purpose describing your academic reasons for selecting a particular program, detailing how the study abroad program will fit into your overall academic program and goals, and how the program benefits your personal, academic, and professional development. This may be the same statement prepared for the AIIS application.
Evaluator Worksheet (available on the AIIS web site)
Transcripts: Applicants should scan their undergraduate and graduate transcripts (from U.S. or Canadian universities only) and include them in the single pdf file.
Confirmation (email or scanned document) from AIIS indicating receipt of complete AIIS summer language program application

2) Recommended: documentation confirming submission of completed applications for the Critical Language Scholarship and/or Boren Scholarship

3) Applicants should also submit two (2) letters of recommendation emailed as an attachment directly from their professor or instructor. Instructors may also mail their recommendations in a sealed envelope signed by the professor to Asian Studies Program, 412 Clemens Hall, Buffalo NY 14260.

Deadline

4 pm Friday, January 5, 2018.

Unless otherwise indicated, all materials must be emailed to Asian-Studies@buffalo.edu

Please contact the Asian Studies Program at Asian-Studies@buffalo.edu or 716-645-3474 if you have any questions.

Literary Decadence and Writing the History of Political Decline

A Public Lecture by

Arthur Dudney (Cambridge University)

Wednesday November 16, 2016 at 3:30 pm

306 Clemens Hall, University at Buffalo (Amherst Campus)

Historians have always been interested in describing the trajectories of empires. The metaphor used for political development has often been that of a human life, from birth through to adolescence, maturity, senescence, and finally death. The topic of this lecture is the senescent phase of empires, more specifically the outmoded but still surprisingly prevalent assumption on the part of historians that whatever other factors have caused an empire to decline, an aesthetic or intellectual failure must also be identified. The
supposed decline in the quality of a late empire’s literary output, or “decadence” to use the term most commonly applied, is however poorly theorized both by historians and literary scholars. There is often a circular logic in the academic division of labor: Historians use the decontextualized insights of literary scholars to argue that literature decreased in quality in an empire’s last phase while literary scholars use historians’ work to read societal decline into literary works. Ultimately this reflects more of our own preconceptions than the thought of the society being studied. This lecture will draw on two very different historiographical case studies, namely the Roman Empire and the Mughal Empire, which ruled much of the Indian subcontinent from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. Our understanding of the fall of Rome has become much more sophisticated in recent decades but in the case of India the colonial historiography (itself built upon some long-outdated ideas about the late Roman Empire) is still in need of being reconsidered.

Dr. Arthur Dudney is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cambridge University and scholar of Indo-Persian literature. He is the author of Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History (Hay House, 2015) and has published work in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Journal of Persianate Studies, Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, and Indian Linguistics. Dudney recently discussed his book and current projects for New Books in South Asian Studies.

Arthur Dudney’s talk is generously supported with funding from the UB Honors College, Department of History, and Department of Linguistics.