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- Title: Shift(s) in(g) the Humanities: The Future of a Futuristic Dissertation
- Host Department: Institute for the Humanities
- Date: 12/08/2009 - 12/08/2009
- Time: 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
- Location: 202 S. Thayer St., Room 2022 Ann Arbor, MI
- Description: Brown Bag Lecture: Emerging Scholar series
Bulbul Tiwari currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.
- Detailed Information:
The production of knowledge and scholarship is changing rapidly and many are asking themselves what constitutes scholarship? What constitutes the academy? This change is not just the result of the digital age, but reflects a larger shift in disciplinarity and knowledge production.
Dr. Tiwari’s digital, performative dissertation, “Maha Multipedia: The Mahabharata reworked in mixed media for a nine night performance,” explores Indian visual culture of the last two thousand years; it traverses ritual, classical dance-drama, folk theatre, sculpture, film and television narratives to create an original version of an ancient Indian epic. It was the first entirely digital dissertation at the University of Chicago and only the third of its kind in the U.S. She is currently working on turning this project into an online digital archive and/or finding it a performative space. In her talk she will begin by giving a guided tour of this project and then continue to discuss the pitfalls of her approach, the future of the project and perils of doing something new.
Bulbul Tiwari is a 2008 recipient of a Ph.D. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and the third person in the country to have submitted her PhD in entirely digital form. Her work blurs the distinction between scholarship and documentary filmmaking and ranges from studies of the heritage of the great Indian epics to documentary films about self-employed women’s associations in India, one act plays and Carriers, a film about truckers in India. She was awarded honorable mention the Emerging Scholars Prize last year.
