Annual Conference
2025: Virtual Conference on Zoom
Jan. 18-19, 2025 (Executive Committee Meeting on Jan. 17, 2025)
You can now register for the conference here
Rethinking South Asia: Postcoloniality & Decolonial Frames and Praxis
Read the CFP here or download the PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF or read it here.
Download the Bio-notes of the Keynote Speaker and Presenters PDF.
2024: Virtual Conference on Zoom
Apr. 6-7, 2024 (Executive Committee Meeting on Apr. 5, 2024)
Ethics of Representation, Forms of Resistance, and Narratives of Discomfort
Read the CFP here or download the PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF or read it here.
Download the Bio-notes of the Keynote Speaker and Presenters PDF.
2023: Virtual Conference on Zoom
Apr. 1-2, 2023 (Executive Committee Meeting on Mar. 31, 2023)
Important Notice: This conference, formerly hybrid, is now 100% online.
Envisioning Black & South Asian Solidarity: History, Culture, Praxis
Read the CFP here or download the PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF or read it here.
2022: Virtual Conference on Zoom
March 11-12, 2022 (Executive Committee meeting on March 10, 2022)
Reading, Writing, and Teaching South Asian Literature in a Pandemic
Download the CFP PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF.
2020: Seattle, WA
January 7-9, 2020 (Executive Committee meeting on January 7, 2020)
Thompson Seattle, 110 Stewart Street, Seattle, Washington 98101-1019 United States
South Asia in the Academy: Classroom Practices, Professional Citizenship, and Intellectual Agency
Download the CFP PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF or read it here.
Download the Conference Abstracts PDF and the Biographies PDF.
Keynote Address: “Coexistence: Towards an Exilic Humanism”
Prof. R. Radhakrishnan, University of California, Irvine
R. Radhakrishnan is Chancellor’s Professor of Humanities and Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature and African American Studies at UC Irvine where he is also core faculty of the PhD program in Culture and Theory. He is author of Diasporic Mediations; Theory in an Uneven World; Between Home and Location: The Politics of Cultural Theory; History, the Human, and the World Between; and Edward Said: A Dictionary. He has edited and co-edited several books and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of edited collections and academic journals. Translator of contemporary Tamil fiction into English, he is a bilingual poet and has authored a volume of poems in English. Winner of a number of fellowships, he is currently guest editing a special issue of the South Asian Review and completing a series of essays on Posthumanism, World Literature, the Epistemology of Pessimism and the Dilemma of Translatability.
Hotel Room Rates:
$199 for a King Room
$199 for a Two Queen Room
(These rates are also available to from Saturday, January 4 to Monday, January 13.)
You can reserve your room by following this link. The Group Code is G-SA19.
2019: Chicago, IL
January 6-7, 2019 (Executive Committee meeting on January 5, 2019)
theWit Chicago, a DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel, 201 North State St., Chicago, IL 60601.
South Asian Literatures in the World
Read the CFP here, or download the PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF, or read it here.
Download the Conference Abstracts PDF and the Biographies PDF.
Keynote Address: “Verbal Icon, Iconic Word: Surdas Between Poem and Painting”
Prof. John Stratton Hawley, Barnard College, Columbia University, NYC
John Stratton Hawley—informally, Jack—is Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. His most recent books on India’s bhakti traditions are A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard, 2015), Sur’s Ocean (with Kenneth Bryant, Harvard, 2015), Into Sur’s Ocean (Harvard Oriental Series, 2016), and an expanded, art-oriented edition of Surdas: Poet, Singer, Saint (Primus, 2018). A Storm of Songs received the A. K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2017; Sur’s Ocean, the A. K. Ramanujan Prize for Translation in 2018. Jack has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hotel Room Rates:
$109 for a Classic King Room
$109 for a Classic Two Queen Room
(These rates are also available to from Thursday, January 3 to Wednesday, January 9.)
You can reserve your room by following this link. Remember to use the Group Code SAL.
2018: New York City, NY
January 8-9, 2018 (Executive Committee meeting on January 7, 2018)
Omni Berkshire Place, 21 East 52nd Street at Madison Ave.
Precarity, Resistance, and Care Communities in South Asia
Read the CFP here, or download the PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF or read it here.
Read the Conference Abstracts and Biographies here, or download them as PDF.
You can also access the 2018 SALA Winter Newsletter here.
Keynote Address: “Precarious Futures, Precarious Pasts: Climate, Terror and Planetarity”
Prof. Gaurav Desai, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Gaurav Desai is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-fashioning and the Colonial Library (Duke University Press, 2001) and editor of Teaching the African Novel (MLA, 2009), he has guest edited and co-edited several volumes of essays in major journals. Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (Rutgers University Press, 2005) which he co-edited with Supriya Nair has become a standard reference and classroom text since its publication. His articles have been published in journals such as PMLA, Genders, Representations, Boundary2, Interventions, African Studies Review and Cultural Critique. Recipient of several prestigious fellowships, in 2004, Desai was made a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. His latest book, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013) received the 2014 Rene Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association.
Hotel Room Rates:
$119 for a Deluxe King Room
$149 for a Deluxe Double/Double Room
(These rates are also available to us for the three days before and the three days after our conference.)
You can reserve your room by following this link.
2017: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
January 2-4, 2017
Wyndham Philadelphia Historic District, 400 Arch St.
Beyond the Postcolonial?: Meaning-Making and South Asian Studies in the 21st Century
Read the CFP here, or download the PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF or read it here.
Read the Conference Abstracts and Biographies here, or download them as PDF.
Keynote Address: “Rethinking the Postcolonial Through Fanon’s New Writings”
Prof. Robert J.C. Young, New York University-Abu Dhabi
Prof. Robert J. C. Young is Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Arts and Humanities, NYU-Abu Dhabi. His seminal works, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) and Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (1995) are considered revolutionary and radical in the field of postcolonial studies. He has published over 15 monographs, which have been translated into Tamil, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, and other languages. He is the editor of Interventions and co-founder of the postcolonial seminar at University of Oxford and New York University.
Prof. Young’s work is primarily concerned with people and cultures at the margins of society both nationally and globally. His work on how to retrieve the knowledge and histories of such communities requires us to rethink some of the theoretical issues about our practice of literary, historical, and cultural analyses in postcolonial studies.
SALA members may make hotel reservations for the SALA 2017 Annual Conference in Philadelphia by directly calling Simon Chikov at the Wyndham Philadelphia Historic District Hotel at 267-765-3345 during business hours EST. Or members can call 1-877-999-3223 and say “SALA.” This number is available 24/7.
Any reservation for check-in from December 31, 2016 to check-out January 9, 2017 at $109 discounted rate will be honored. The code is SALA.
2016: Austin, Texas
January 4-6, 2016
Wyndham Garden Hotel, 3401 South IH-35
Cultural Practices in the South Asian Public Sphere
Read the CFP here, or download the PDF here.
Download the Conference Program PDF or read it here.
Read the Conference Abstracts and Biographies here or download them as PDF.
Keynote Address: “In the Age of UAVs: Targeted Killings, Collateral Damage, and Drones in the Public Sphere”
Prof. Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin
Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Resistance Literature (1986), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996), and co-editor with Mia Carter of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (1999) and Archives of Empire (edited with Mia Carter): 1. From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and 2. The Scramble for Africa (2003). She has taught in Egypt (Cairo), Ireland (Galway), and South Africa (Pietermaritzburg and Durban) In addition to an intellectual biography of the South African activist, Ruth First, she is working on a project examining historical connections between international humanitarian/human rights law and “third world” literature.
SALA members may make reservations by calling 1-800-WYNDHAM and using “SALA” as their code, for $109 per night, or, to book online, visit the hotel’s web site and use the code 01026702SA. To get the group rate, reservations must be made by December 14, 2015. For more information, download the SALA 1.4.16 Reservation Instructions (Microsoft Word, 28 KB).
As part of SALA 2016 in Austin, Texas, we will have “Hamara Mushaira” (a night of readings) as in previous years. This event will be organized by Prof. Amritjit Singh, as usual. If any of you would like to read your creative writing the evening of Jan. 5 (the first day of the conference-proper), please contact Professor Singh directly at singha@ohio.edu by Dec. 15, 2015.
Our annual dinner banquet will be held at the Bombay Bistro, on 4200 S. Lamar Blvd. from 8-10 p.m., Wednesday, January 6, 2016. You may pay for your dinner ticket when you preregister for the conference.
2015: Vancouver, Canada
January 6-7, 2015
Listel Hotel, 1300 Robson Street
Borders, Boundaries, and Margins.
Download the conference program PDF or read it here.
Read the CFP here, or download the PDF.
2014: Chicago, Illinois
January 8-9, 2014
Aloft Hotel, City Center Chicago
Download the Conference Program 2014, Program With Abstracts, or go to the 2014 Conference Program and Abstracts page.
Keynote Address: “Future Interrupted: The Subjunctive Nationalism of M.N. Roy”
Prof. Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota.
TIMOTHY BRENNAN is Professor of comparative literature, cultural studies, and English at the University of Minnesota. His essays on literature, cultural politics, American intellectuals, music, and colonialism have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and the London Review of Books. He is the author most recently of Borrowed Light, Vol I: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies (Stanford, 2014) and Borrowed Light, Vol. II: The Interwar Moment — Imperial Form (Stanford: forthcoming). He is the editor and co-translator of Alejo Carpentier’s Music in Cuba (2003) and author of Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Verso, 2008), Empire in Different Colors (Revolver, 2007), Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia, 2006), At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard 1997), and Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (1989).
Call for Papers (Download .PDF here)
2013: Boston, Massachusetts
January 2-3, 2013
Distinguished Award Recipient: Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak
Access and print out the 2013 Conference Program and Presentation Abstracts (.PDF).
Call for Papers (Download .PDF version here)
Graduate Student Paper Prize, 2013
2012: Seattle, Washington
January 4-5, 2012
Access and print out the Conference Program and the Presentation Abstracts (listed alphabetically by the presenter’s last name).
2011: Los Angeles, California
January 7-8, 2011