CSASA-ACESA, the Canadian South Asian Studies Association/Association canadienne d’études sud-asiatiques (CSASA-ACESA) is a scholarly association affiliated with the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. CSASA-ACESA, founded in 2019, draws on a long history of scholarship on South Asian Studies in Canada, and is intended to further the academic study of South Asia-Canada and to enhance national awareness of South Asia-related events and resources at Canadian universities and colleges. CSASA-ACESA is proud to host its fourth Annual Meeting in-person at the Federation’s Annual Congress, Canada’s largest academic gathering (June 3rd-6th, 2025) George Brown College, Toronto.
Send us an email at csasa.acesa@gmail.com to learn more about the association, attending our annual meeting, or becoming involved with the association.
Members of the organizing committee:
Julie Vig, Assistant Professor, York University
Julie Vig is Assistant Professor of Humanities, Religious Studies, and South Asian Cultures at York University. Her research focuses on premodern Sikh and Punjabi cultural production and how it relates to wider cultural worlds and networks of premodern North India (c.1500-1850). Her particular focus is on gurbilās literature and its interactions with broader Brajbhasha literature in the early modern period. She also has secondary research interests in the reception of early modern Sikh texts in the colonial period and women, gender, and sexuality within the Sikh tradition.
julievig@yorku.ca
Andrea Farran, Associate Professor, McGill University
Andrea Farran is Associate Professor in South Asian Religions at McGill University in the Faculty of Arts. She first studied South Asian civilization as an undergraduate at McGill in the Faculty of Religious Studies (B.A.); then in India (Banaras Hindu University, Adv. Diploma in Hindi) and the United States (M.A., University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Ph.D., Columbia University). She has taught in India (Antioch College and S.I.T.), and Singapore (National University of Singapore); her research languages are Hindi-Urdu and Sanskrit. She serves as Vice-President of CSASA-ACESA, the Canadian South Asian Studies Association / Association canadienne d’études sud-asiatiques.
andrea.farran@mcgill.ca
Arafaat Valiani, Associate Professor, University of Oregon
Dr. Arafaat Valiani, PhD is Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Oregon. Dr. Valiani studied postcolonial and social theory as an undergraduate at Concordia University in Montreal, African history and thought in the United Kingdom (MA School of Oriental and African Studies), and then focused on modern South Asian history, history of the life sciences and medical ethnography in the United States (MPhil./PhD Columbia University) at the doctoral level. His research and teaching combine transdisciplinary insights from the history of science, postcolonial science studies and critical data studies in order to contribute to the study of genetics and the life sciences in modern South Asia, as well as biomedical ethics pertaining to the prospect of introducing precision medicine to address health inequities experienced by South Asians and other racialized communities in North America. His research languages are Kutchi, Urdu, Gujarati and Hindi. He serves as a member of the Executive Committee of CSASA-ACESA, the Canadian South Asian Studies Association / Association canadienne d’études sud-asiatiques.
arafaat.valiani@ucalgary.ca
www.arafaat.com
Shobna Nijhawan, Associate Professor, York University
Shobna Nijhawan is Associate Professor of Hindi at York University in Toronto (Canada). She studied Classical Indology and Modern Indology at the South Asia Institute at Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg in Germany (M.A.) and South and Southeast Asian Studies with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at University of California, Berkeley in the USA (Ph.D.). She is the author of Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere. Periodical Literature in Colonial North India (2012), Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow. Gender, Genre and Visuality in the Creation of a Literary ‘Canon’ (2018), editor of Nationalism in the Vernacular (2010) and co-editor of Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular. Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia (2022). She has published various articles on gender, nationalism, Hindi language and literature in late-colonial India as well as on (digital) pedagogy for the South Asian Studies curriculum.
shobna@yorku.ca
https://shobna.info.yorku.ca
Sarwat Viqar, John Abbott Cégep/College
sarwat.viqar@johnabbott.qc.ca
Sloane Geddes, Doctoral Candidate, University of Toronto
Sloane is a doctoral candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, titled “Writing Avadāna for the Court: Poetry, Power, and Wonder in Śivasvāmin’s Kapphiṇābhyudaya, explores how a religious narrative about a king’s wondrous encounter with the Buddha was recast in an erudite Sanskrit poem produced in early medieval Kashmir. Her research, broadly conceived, is concerned with the way medieval Sanskrit authors and their readers used literature as a means to navigate questions of religion, gender, and sexuality, through literary aesthetics, narrative, and practices around books and reading. For 2024-2025 she is a Doctoral Fellow for the Hidden Stories: New Approaches to the Local and Global History of the Book project.
kathryn.geddes@mail.utoronto.ca
