Symposium

The Annual Conference on South Asia’s Symposium (formerly known as PreConference) offers half and full-day time slots during which presenters and participants can actively discuss more complex topics that would not be suitable to our shorter 105-minute panel format.

All symposia are open to registered conference attendees

Held at Madison Concourse Hotel unless otherwise indicated.

Some symposia may be offered in a hybrid format; information will be shared below as it becomes available.

2025 Symposium Schedule

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AIIS Workshop: Transforming Your Dissertation into a Book

Madison Ballroom, full day

The American Institute of Indian Studies holds an annual dissertation-to-book workshop at the Madison South Asia Conference, co-sponsored by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies. The workshop aims to help a select number of recent PhDs re-vision their doctoral dissertations as books. Author participants are selected through an application process, and all admitted authors will submit a sample chapter and draft book proposal in advance, to be read by each member of their working group. The interdisciplinary workshop begins with a “Secrets of Publishing” Q&A discussion from 7-8:30 pm on Tuesday evening. During the day-long Wednesday symposium, we will divide into three groups of eight authors and three mentors each, to work intensively together discussing each project. We conclude the workshop with an all-group dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant. Faculty from diverse disciplines and areas of expertise will serve as mentors. Mentors have each published at least one book, specialize in a range of South Asian regions (including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), and come from various disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, sociology, history, literature, media studies, gender studies, and religious studies.

AIPS Emerging Scholars Symposium

Conference Room 2, half day

The American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) will host a half-day symposium to mentor emerging scholars working on Pakistan-related research. This will be the fifth such event at the Annual Conference on South Asia. The symposium will showcase new research by approximately six to eight US-based emerging scholars (both recent PhDs and graduate students with ABD status) whose research addresses Pakistan Studies. AIPS will hold an open call for applications, which it will widely advertise through its member institutions and its social media sites. It encourages abstracts from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, literature, religious studies, art history, and music. AIPS has identified established scholars to read the accepted papers and provide feedback, mentorship, and focused discussion following participants’ presentations. Because presenters get selected in advance, coupled with an in-depth question/answer/discussion period, the event will fully utilize a half-day and is inappropriate for the traditional conference panel format. AIPS’s emerging scholar symposiums enable emerging scholars to network with others in their field and expose them to established scholars who can act as additional advisors/mentors. The past AIPS emerging scholar symposiums held at the ACSA have been instrumental in creating a nationwide dialogue between emerging and established Pakistan Studies scholars. Significant outcomes of past symposiums include published books, forged mentorships, written articles, and revised dissertations.

Being(s) of the Land and Flowing of the Water(s): Thinking with Indigeneity in Tibet and South Asia

Senate Room A, full day

What does it mean to be Indigenous in South Asia? In our symposium, we gather scholars who identify as Indigenous to Tibet and the Himalayas to consider how being Indigenous is intertwined with colonialism and ongoing struggles on the land. We are committed to engaging with lived experiences and ongoing contestations around Indigeneity to examine how such developments shape Indigenous practices. We hope this symposium can generate meaningful conversations about Indigeneity in contemporary South Asia. Being Indigenous is a political and epistemological claim, one that is oriented towards claiming a just future. In this context, claims to being Indigenous in South Asia, in particular, Tibet and the Himalayas, are connected to justice. We invoke the following interrelated themes of inquiry that connects with the objective of the symposium: (a) how and why are claims to Indigeneity considered a journey of justice across communities in South Asia; (b) How do assertions of custodianship including land-based practices and rituals shape and are shaped by claims of Indigeneity?; (c) How do communities who identify as Indigenous engage with everyday aesthetic and mundane forms which situate and deepen their identity and selfhood as Indigenous?; (d) How do distinctive ways of being Indigenous shape one’s research, communication, and the fundamentals of conducting fieldwork. All the speakers in the symposium will share images, songs, prayers, rituals, and accounts that speak to the questions we presented above. Our aim for the symposium is to invite all the participants to connect, discuss, and share their insights. We hope the emerging conversations connect and organically link the four inquiries we have offered. Of course, participants and speakers are welcome and open to generate questions outside the objectives framed above and reflect together on what it means to be Indigenous in South Asia.

Beyond the Footnotes: Taking Tamil Commentaries Seriously

University CD, full day

Commentaries have played a major role in the study of South Asian literature, both as resources for interpreting their source texts and as innovative contributions to the theorization of literary cultures. The influence of commentaries is especially prominent in the study of premodern Tamil literature, in which unique linguistic forms and subtle literary gaps often require the use of a commentary to make sense of the source material. While commentaries are often utilized and referenced in the existing research on premodern Tamil literature, relatively little attention has been given to commentaries as objects of analytic scrutiny in their own right, and commentaries are rarely published apart from their source texts—when indeed they are published at all. Yet, Tamil commentaries are an extraordinarily rich resource for deepening our understanding of the literary, religious, and intellectual spheres of premodern South India and an invaluable resource for examining shifts in reading and interpretive practices over time, literary networks, sectarian identity and exchange, and the ever-contested boundaries of the Tamil literary canon. This symposium aims to bring together scholars at various stages of their careers who work on an array of Tamil commentarial materials in order to highlight the significant payout of taking commentaries seriously as individual textual interpretations with projects or agendas that are embedded in large socio-cultural systems and literary cultures. In doing so, this symposium builds on the growing body of scholarship published in the last twenty years that increasingly has begun to pay attention to Tamil commentaries, including but not limited to the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentarial tradition that flourished from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and aims to extend these insights in productive new directions.

Deccan as Method

Parlor 627, full day

Though constituted by disparate polities, environment and community formations, the Deccan has long been approached as a cohesive area of study. A vibrant strain of revisionist scholarship on the Deccan has studied the region’s multilingual social formations; its complex ecologies and extractive regimes; the links with Luso-Iberian empires, the Islamic Mediterranean; movements for social egalitarianism. These studies have focused on the medieval and early modern periods, but this symposium seeks to extend the focus to include innovative scholarship on the colonial and postcolonial periods and ask: can Deccan allow us to see South Asia anew? The Deccan presents distinct archives of socio-political formations which elucidate aspects of South Asia that remain outside the focus of other regions. For instance, the region redefines the study of political economy in South Asia due to the strong presence of indigenous capitalists and trading families across the Indian Ocean world; affords study of dominant caste peasant life (e.g., cooperatives, rural manufacture, agrarian capitalism, populist movements); presents forms of speculation in urban land markets in major metropolitan regions that has transformed urban history more generally; is marked by vigorous histories of working class protest, and offers the chance to link study of precarious ecologies with infrastructural intervention. At the same time, scholars of the region have paid attention to novel constellations of community, social identities, and cultural rights with specific focus on the languages and politics of anticaste populism. In this symposium, we will ask speakers to briefly introduce their works by provocation, which addresses how their work rethinks South Asian scholarship from a Deccan-centric perspective. By drawing on scholars whose work addresses critical perspectives on the region that is creative in its conception, and works through models of connection and comparison, we hope to develop an agenda for future study of Deccan lifeworlds.

Labors of Making / Practices of Earth and Water

Caucus Room, full day

From large-scale colonial irrigation projects to the harvesting of natural pigments for textiles, this symposium examines the ecological settings of practices of making in South Asia and its transregional relations. This symposium interrogates, through interdisciplinary engagements in visual and material culture and the history of art and architecture, the powerful intersections of ecology, aesthetics, labor, and cultural production in the colony and postcolony. While wide-ranging literature speaks of the politics of labor and craft, we seek to gain precision on those politics through studies of aesthetic practices, and through the ways things take shape and touch ground in specific habitats. We draw on an emerging literature that theorizes the environmental and elemental, from the shifting chars to the travels of the monsoon, in order to historicize and situate practices of water and earth through the ways those habitats give rise to forms of labor. Together we wish to debate and understand the historical transformations and socio-cultural meanings of the relations between forms and ecosystems, between techniques of material and cultural production and the various tangible and intangible effects of that labor, and between discourses and aesthetics in South Asia and beyond. We seek to interrogate collective aesthetic practices and individual works, whether at the scales of handicraft or urbanism, from precolonial geographies to international collaborations, and through a lens that prioritizes practices of making and the ecological horizons of that labor. These parameters bear on and are shaped by problems of colonialism and governmentality, political subject formation intersecting with gender, religion, caste, and class, industrial and urban development and preservation of heritage environments, and– not least– climate histories and futures. We will address diverse forms of aesthetic practice and cultural production– thinking with art, photography, film, textiles, architecture, landscapes, and ephemeral structures– in the shaping of modern South Asia.

Majoritarianism and Community Resilience in Modern India: Histories, Modalities, Futures

Conference Room 4, full day

The rise of Hindutva as a dominant political and ideological force in India has sparked significant scholarly interest, as evidenced by recent high-profile academic engagements. In 2024, Christophe Jaffrelot’s lecture on the historical development of Hindutva at the Annual South Asia Conference in Madison drew an overflow audience, while the January 2025 American Historical Association panel featuring Vinayak Chaturvedi, Neeti Nair, and Amrita Basu further underscored the academic community’s recognition of Hindutva’s centrality to contemporary South Asian politics. However, these discussions have largely focused on the ideologies, strategies, and impacts of Hindutva, often neglecting the agency and resilience of the communities most affected by its policies—particularly India’s Muslim population. This symposium seeks to address this critical gap by centering the experiences, creative responses, and resistance strategies of Muslim communities navigating increasingly restrictive sociopolitical conditions. By doing so, it aims to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the lived realities of majoritarianism in modern India. This symposium is not merely an academic exercise but a moral and ethical imperative. In a context where academic freedom and minority voices are increasingly under threat, it is essential to create spaces where critical perspectives can be freely expressed and where the experiences of marginalized communities can be foregrounded. An extended full-day conversation allows us to develop our ideas and guide and mentor the contributors to develop publishable essays in a forthcoming volume, paired with the twelve essays from the European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) conference triple panel.

Many Yogavāsiṣṭhas

Senate Room B, full day

This symposium extends from the “Many Yogavāsiṣṭhas” project, a multilingual, collaborative textual-study project that seeks to trace the Pan-Indian impact of the Yogavāsiṣṭha (c. 11th – 14th C CE), an important Classical Sanskrit philosophical-literary text that has popularly been transmitted in the Advaita Vedānta tradition. Over the centuries, the Yogavāsiṣṭha has circulated widely throughout India by means of its abridged Sanskrit edition known as the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha, which has inspired many vernacular translations, re-tellings and commentaries. The earliest manuscript tradition of the Yogavāsiṣṭha, known as the Mokṣopāya (c. 950 CE), points to an early nondual (advaita) tradition separate from hegemonic Advaita Vedānta, complicating our received historiography. The papers in this symposium seek to shed light on the process by which the non-sectarian advaita philosophy of the Mokṣopāya was integrated into the Śaṅkara lineage of Advaita Vedānta. We will investigate the historical and philosophical footprint of the Mokṣopāya via the Yogavāsiṣṭha and other instances of its transmission, reformulation and doctrinal adjustment. We ask, How did the Yogavāsiṣṭha, through its many vernacular iterations, acquired pan-Indian authority as an Advaita Vedānta text when its earliest manuscript tradition does not indicate any Vedānta affiliation? How did the Yogavāsiṣṭha become a key text in Persian literature which must be addressed in order to understand the philosophical objectives of that textual lineage? What do the alternate versions, translations and interpretations look like? And what do these instances tell us about the social and political context of those who composed them? The many vectors of this text—into Persian literature, vernacular traditions in Tamil, Marathi and Hindi—and the processes of doctrinal shift that they reveal have only recently begun to be explored, and the symposium with its planned edited volume will make a significant contribution to this scholarship.

Play, Non-work, and Leisure in South Asia

Conference Room 5, full day

From making tik tok videos to strolling through malls and from whistling at the silver screen to partying in bars, South Asia enjoys non-work. This full day symposium both celebrates and examines the intricate politics behind the array of practices that can be broadly understood as South Asian play, leisure, and non-work. Leisure, a term originally used to refer to consumptive practices during non-laboring times and a classed activity, is deconstructed in this symposium by examining the variety of ways in which South Asians approach non-work time across socio-economic classes. Situating ourselves within gender, caste, and class studies we examine transformative, transgressive, and radical practices of leisure, non-work, and play while acknowledging the barriers and violence embedded in it through their history and present-day iterations. We do not believe play, leisure, and non-work to be apolitical acts and instead conceptualize them as critical to understanding the current and historical sociopolitical dynamics of South Asia. Papers will examine different aspects and terminologies of non-work, play, and leisure: Timepass and ghumna look at ordinary practices of hanging out, stolen moments, and the non-productive “work” of gossip and chit-chat, to think about the construction of time and time delays embedded in the term. Masti looks at gendered and sexual constructions of “fun,” as well as the embedded power relations of celebrations of joy, and how “khel” or play is defined through this term (see also Anjaria and Anjaria et al 2020). Fursat, aaram, and oivyu examine moments of rest and relaxation, of pauses between work, and their implication for how work itself is understood. While not meant to be all encompassing these terminologies allow entry into different modalities of leisure in South Asia.

Printing without Permanence: The Periodical in South Asia

Assembly Room, full day

Despite its ephemerality as a print object, the periodical has had a sustained influence on South Asian literary, cultural, and socio-political imaginations. The multilingual, multigenre, and multimedial engagements of the periodical make it a potent form to be inserted within critical conversations and generate new publics in national and transnational contexts. Beyond the conventional categorization of ‘little magazines’ and ‘mainstream journals’, book historians of South Asia have found periodicals to be archives of manifold identities and collectivities, such as those constituted by college magazines, science periodicals, proletarian magazines, caste journals, children’s papers and so on. Oftentimes bending the rules of the genre, the magazine in South Asia has lent itself to numerous patterns of circulation and multiple functions, not all of which are ideologically consistent. For instance, on the one hand, periodicals generate maps of local and global knowledges and desires that otherwise might not be available to readers, a feat that is frequently financed through advertisements. On the other hand, as a product of print modernity, periodicals also try to democratize access to political consciousness and critical vocabulary for minoritized sections of the society, often defying commercialization. A near-elusive object of much editorial scrutiny and authoritarian censorship, the periodical has emerged as a historical actor in a diverse range of modern politico-cultural debates across the subcontinent, which cannot be studied under the restrictive parameters of a tightly thematized panel. Through this symposium we want to explore how the South Asian periodical is not simply a repository of colonial and postcolonial histories but an active participant in those conversations.

Prosimetric Literature in South Asia

Parlor 629, full day

Prosimetric literature (often termed campukavya), involving the blending of prose and verse, became a major mode of literary production in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and regional languages in South Asia from the 8th century CE. The simultaneous rise of prosimetric poetry across these traditions raises significant questions about literary influence and stylistic choice, and more broadly between literary form and content. In Sanskrit, the interplay between prose (gadya) and verse (padya) allowed for more expansive descriptions and intricate literary ornamentation, offering creative freedom to explore social imaginaries beyond the constrained tropes and structures of mahakavya poetry. For Prakrit, the prose-verse form gave dynamism to lengthy narrative sections that involved less description than Sanskrit works either accelerating or slowing the rhythm, while also allowing for shifts in perspective and tonal variation. Similarly, in South Indian literary traditions of Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam, the alternation between prose and verse influenced narration, pacing, and audience engagement. Our discussions will focus on how regional literary style influenced Sanskrit, while being simultaneously permeated by Sanskrit linguistic and rhetorical elements. The symposium will also explore comparison with Persian literature, which was dominated by prose-verse mixed composition. Despite recognized symmetries between Sanskrit, Prakrit, and South Indian prosimetric literatures, scholarly examinations have so far been largely limited to focused studies of individual works and literary traditions. The symposium is crucial for starting a broader conversation, and giving this rich and neglected area of South Asia’s literary heritage the attention it deserves. The symposium format will allow for scholars working in a range of languages and periods to workshop research-in-progress and will facilitate conversations about shared methodological and theoretical questions transcending the presenters’ own research areas.

Refusal and Reclaiming the Indigenous Baloch Perspective: A Symposium on Balochistan and Beyond

Conference Room 1, full day

We invite participation in a full-day symposium at ACSA that critically engages with the themes of refusal and reclaiming the Indigenous Baloch ontologies, epistemologies, and perspectives. We focus on the spaces, histories, and geographies embedded in everyday stories of resistance, transformation, and survival of the Baloch nation. The question of Balochistan remains an unsettled one within the state apparatus of Pakistan, since its annexation in 1948. In light of the growing global movement toward reclaiming Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, we, as Baloch students and scholars, seek to ask: What is the problem of Balochistan? How has Balochistan’s history been constructed, and what does that history mean for its Baloch inhabitants? Is Balochistan a militarized region within Pakistan, or is it an occupied land? Is the issue one of representation, or does it extend into deeper socio-economic, political, and cultural domains? What do concepts like self-determination, honor, and dignity mean to Baloch, and how are they being overlooked or marginalized within the broader political struggle between Pakistan and Balochistan? Moreover, how are the Baloch perspectives further sidelined in the expanding contest for influence, now extending beyond Pakistan, India, and other South Asian countries to China’s growing strategic interest in Balochistan’s geostrategic location? These critical questions arise when discussing Balochistan, a place and people whose representation has historically been constructed about them rather than with them. This symposium aims to bring together Baloch scholars, students, practitioners, and community members to create an intellectual and activist space where Baloch voices from Balochistan and beyond can converge to interrogate dominant narratives and assert their own perspectives.

Religious Encounter, Translation, Transformation: Exploring the Scholarly Legacy of Tony K. Stewart (1954-2024)

Wisconsin Ballroom, full day

This symposium explores the scholarly legacy of Tony K. Stewart (1954-2024) by responding to his writings on religious encounter, hagiography, and translation in South Asia. We understand these themes as processes that play out through a complex network of authority, social relationships, and texts. Beginning with Stewart’s salient article, “In Search of Equivalence,” (2001), we test his approach to examining the Hindu-Muslim encounter in early modern Bengal to other times, geographies, and genres. Hagiography both constructs and transforms religious communities through complex negotiations of authority, theology, and practice. Stewart’s groundbreaking monograph, The Final Word (2010), on the Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Krishnadas Kaviraj, moves panelists to consider the significance of Stewart’s interpretation of it in their own scholarship on the Bengali Vaishnava tradition. Moving beyond the Bengali literary world, Stewart’s work on hagiography encourages the examination of the genre as an ever-shifting discourse of authorship, devotional practices, and community values to understand how the saint’s image is constructed. We expand this scholarship to life stories throughout South Asia by thinking about the strategies biographers use to address the concerns of their audience and the social and temporal realities they live in. Stewart’s dexterous engagement with translation theory and his craft of translation inspires our panelists to examine the role of translation theory and practice in their own work, whether in the form of texts, materials, or ideas. This symposium will bring together scholars at all levels who engage with religious encounter, hagiography, and translation in the study of South Asian religiosity.

Science, Technology, and Medicine in South Asia Symposium: Engineering across the Ages

Parlor 638, full day

Recent years have seen the rise of a critical scholarship focused on engineers, artisans, and artists in South Asia. New monographs have depicted the rise of technological ideologies in post-colonial India (Bassett 2019; Subramanian 2019; Irani 2019), the religious practices and identities of artisans in British India (Lanzillo 2024), and the styles of artists and architects building temples in medieval South Asia (Kaligotla 2022). Labor and agrarian history has a long pedigree in South Asia, and the recent rise of “critical caste studies” has connected questions of labor and identity. This full-day workshop gathers scholars from a range of disciplines and fields to bring such questions together under the rubric of “science and technology studies.” The goal of the workshop is to highlight epistemic practices of people who are often excluded from traditional intellectual history, and to tell material histories connected to particular communities and individuals. It takes an expansive view of South Asian history, inviting participants working in the medieval, early modern, and modern periods, and it encourages thinking across borders by emphasizing the importance of travel across the spaces that are currently divided between Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. The workshop will consist of two sessions. In the first session, we will discuss a collective bibliography that participants will contribute to prior to the meeting. In the second session, we will discuss short primary sources (texts, images, objects) that each participant has selected and pre-circulated to the group.

Tamil Studies: Future and New Directions

University AB, full day

Tamil’s distinctiveness is primarily understood through its Dravidian, non-Indo-Aryan linguistic structure. Scholars have traditionally emphasized “Dravidian consciousness” as fundamental to understanding the Tamil language and culture. However, Tamil scholar Xavier S. Thaninayagam initiated a paradigm shift from philological studies to cultural studies in the 1960s (Raman, 2017). Through his leadership, international Tamil conferences in Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and India have established Tamil Studies as a multidisciplinary field. Five decades later, today’s scholars engage with Tamil Studies through diverse research streams, including Environmental Studies, Gender Studies, and Digital Humanities. Nevertheless, the dialogue between these new research approaches and traditional disciplines such as History and Anthropology has not been effectively channeled within Tamil Studies. This symposium aims to bridge conversations between innovative disciplinary approaches and traditional fields. By bringing multidisciplinary perspectives into dialogue, we seek to collectively reimagine Tamil Studies’ future. The symposium will feature three panels bringing together senior professors, early career researchers, and PhD scholars.

The Theory of Practice & Practice of Theory in South Asia

Conference Room 3, full day

Did theory and practice exist as self-conscious markers categorizing discursive production in pre-modern South Asia? How did South Asian intellectuals and practitioners conceive of theory and praxis across disciplinary, linguistic and genre boundaries? What were the emergent interactions between South Asian procedures distinguishing them and those introduced by European and contemporary academic classificatory methodologies? How do these interactions play out in our own work of theorizing and practicing scholarship? The panel seeks to address these questions as a means of academic and methodological self-reflection. Sheldon Pollock’s work has made a case for the tendency of theory to determine and precede practice in South Asia at a scale unmatched anywhere else, although focusing primarily on śāstra and prayoga (as theory and praxis respectively). It has broached ways in which theory regulates and codifies the practical and social spheres by offering various ‘cultural grammars’ of rule-governance. The panel encourages constructive engagements with this thesis. But there have existed other formulations of the theory-praxis distinction, as between jñāna (knowledge) and karma/kriyā (action) or sāṃkhya (theory) and yoga (application). Conceptions like vyavahār (usage), upayog (use), upāy (expedient), abhyās (practice), prayojan (motive) occupy the semantic landscape of ‘practice’ in South Asia. What are the implications of conceiving theory and praxis along such alternative frameworks? We also take note of the judgment that ‘Indian thought’ is too ‘practical’, concerned with the exigencies of the everyday as opposed to the pure pursuit of theoria. We are thus faced with a paradox in the wake of previous scholarship: Indian modes of discourse are too determined by theory (thus erasing historical change and practice) and conversely, owing to their practical entanglements, not theoretical enough. The panel considers further engagement with these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, inviting scholars of philosophy, literature, aesthetics, embodied practice, intellectual history and critical theory.

Ways of Doing Bhakti Studies

Capitol Ballroom A, full day

This full-day public symposium will convene scholars who use various methods and approaches to share their view of the state of bhakti scholarship and, eventually, contribute to a field-defining “handbook” of bhakti studies. Behind this project are twelve years of collaborative labor in the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network (RBSN) to research across regions, languages, traditions, and methodologies. Through ten annual Madison symposia with 81 unique presenters, two multi-day workshops elsewhere, a special journal issue and co-edited volume, and a large grant-supported digital humanities project (the Bhakti Virtual Archive or BHAVA), the RBSN has nurtured innovative studies of bhakti by bringing together scholars and knowledge that earlier had been sequestered in region- and language-specific fields. In the months before the symposium, participant teams (eventually co-authors) will use BHAVA’s bibliographic database to explore recent scholarship on their topic across South Asia. Topics (eventual chapters) include the history of bhakti studies, semantic range of bhakti in emic and etic usage, relationships to living communities, bhakti in non-Hindu traditions, embodiment, gender, literary forms, visual culture, caste, teaching, and more. Symposium participants will summarize their findings and identify trends, lacunae, and future research avenues. Through ensuing discussion, we all will refine the scope of each topic/chapter and the larger “handbook” project further, with practical next steps: virtual follow-up meetings and brainstorming the optimal format of the eventual publication (perhaps identifying a sharper term than “handbook”). We will envision the state of current scholarship together, discuss issues around an eventual publication, and—above all—to articulate the dimensions of “bhakti studies” generally, with the help of many scholars who have shaped it. As a crucial stepping-stone toward a publication that defines the field, the content of this symposium far exceeds the time of a single or double panel.

Symposium Submission Guidelines

To propose a Symposium (formerly known as ‘PreConference’), you must submit:

  • A 200-300 word abstract
  • A preliminary list of speakers*
  • A preliminary schedule**
  • Justification of why the content of your proposed Symposium warrants more time than a panel or double-panel would allow

*We understand that your list of preliminary speakers and your proposed schedule may change following acceptance. Please do your best to give us a sense of who will be speaking (i.e. how many speakers, of which professional backgrounds, from which geographic regions, etc.) and what the schedule might look like when you submit your proposal (i.e. how much time is dedicated to presentations, audience discussion, breakout discussion, etc.).

**Your Symposium schedule must work around our all-conference breaks (7:30-8:30am, 10:15-10:30am, 3:30-3:45pm) and lunch (12:15-1:45pm).


Please note that you may request a 1/2 day or full day Symposium.

A full day Symposium runs from 8:30am to 5:30pm
A half day Symposium runs from 8:30am to 12:15pm or from 1:45 to 5:30pm


If you submit a Symposium and your submission is not accepted, you still have time to submit a Panel, Round Table, or Single Paper given the April 5 deadline for these submission types. All Symposium speakers must register for the conference by June 30. Registration refunds are offered through September 15 should your proposals not be accepted.

The Annual Conference on South Asia’s Symposia (formerly known as PreConference) offers half and full-day time slots during which presenters and participants can actively discuss more complex topics that would not be suitable to our shorter 105-minute panel format.

Half Day Symposia run from either 8:30am – 12:15pm or 1:45 – 5:30pm.
Full Day Symposia run from 8:30am – 5:30pm.

Your Symposium schedule must work with our all-conference breaks (7:30-8:30am, 10:15-10:30am, 3:30-3:45pm) and lunch (12:15-1:45pm).

Please note that your Symposium participants must register and submit payment upon your Symposium being accepted.

Please see our Conference Deadlines page for detailed information on important cutoff dates.

Submit Your Proposal Here!