University of Heidelberg

Tasveer Ghar project announces short-term fellows

Oct 12, 2010

On behalf of the research project HRA 9 "Satellite of Networks", coordinated by Prof. Dr. Christiane Brosius, the Cluster-related project Tasveer Ghar announces the awardees of short-term fellowships on the theme "Circulation of Popular Images and Media in Muslim Religious Spheres".

Out of a number of excellent proposals, the following candidates have been selected for their respective themes:

Abeer Gupta explores "The culture of Islam in the Western Himalayas". He is a film maker and an alumnus of the National Institute of Design, India, and Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham, previous short-term fellows of the Cluster in 2009, will focus on "Chasing the original image: An exploration of devotional visual culture at the shrine of Sailani Baba". Amit Madheshiya is a photographer while Shirley Abraham is a researcher and documentary film-maker, both are based in Mumbai.

Fiza Ishaq and Annapurna Garimella have chosen to study "Shia devotional art and material culture: Visual narratives of transculturation, social memory and community identity". Fiza Ishaq is a researcher with a Masters in Cross-Cultural Psychology. Dr. Annapurna Garimella is a designer and art historian, heading the Art, Resources and Teaching Trust in Bangalore.

Noman Baig, a PhD student of Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin, studies "Mediating Belief and Senses: Dawat-e-Islami' Emerging Madina of Visuality".

Yogesh Snehi will focus on "Replicating Memory, Creating Images: Pirs and Dargahs in popular art and  media of contemporary East Punjab". He is an Assistant Professor in History at DAV College, Amritsar.

The aim of the fellowships is to assemble multi-disciplinary and multi-media projects of research and documentation on the topic of popular visual cultures and practices in and around Muslim shrines and public spaces, with an emphasis on the transcultural flows as emerging in the globalised contemporary popular arts and media.

The fellowships will culminate in papers to be published in a special volume of the e-journal of Transcultural Studies. Digitised material will be fed into the Heidelberg Research Architecture in order to facilitate further initiatives on transcultural Muslim popular cultures.

Further information about the fellowships is available in the official announcement (PDF format) by the Tasveer Ghar initiative.

For further information about the fellows and Tasveer Ghar, please click here. 

Further links:

HRA9 "Satellites of Networks"
Profile Prof. Dr. Christiane Brosius