Join us for a lecture by Samia Khatun based on her new book ‘Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia‘, on April 18. The book challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present, and future.
Cosponsored by Center for Global Asia, NYU & The Islamicate Studies Working Group, Liberal Studies, NYU.
Event Details:
Featuring: Samia Khatun, PhD
Discussants: Vivek Bald (MIT), Ishan Chakrabarti (University of Chicago), and David Ludden (NYU)
Moderator: Dina M. Siddiqi (NYU)
When: April 18, 5 pm – 7 pm
Where: Room 101, 5 Washington Place
Copies of the book will be available for sale.
Wine and cheese will be served.
About Samia Khatun
Dr. Samia Khatun is a historian because she once lost her way to a mathematics lecture at the University of Sydney. Since then, she has chased truths about the past in Antigua, Kolkata, Istanbul, Berlin, New York, Dunedin, Melbourne, London, and Dhaka. Her documentaries have screened on ABC and SBS-TV in Australia and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and at the University of Melbourne. Teaching in Dhaka since 2017, Samia has been working on a project to decolonize the history classroom at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh. In September 2019 she will be taking up the position of Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London.
This event is open to the public. For non-NYU attendees, please bring a photo ID for security purposes.
