Sunday Reading

Bint Battuta:

• Mapping the sound of Byzantine churches
• An early anonymous Greek translation of the Qur'?n
• Akbar’s "Jesus" and Marlowe's "Tamburlaine": Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness
• The Hindu Buddha and the Buddhist Visnu: Religious Transformations in India and Sri Lanka
• BBC Radio 4's In Our Time on the Upanishads
• "It was expected of me that, as a non-Westerner, I study my own region"
• An Ottoman Widow in British-Occupied Baghdad
• Ottoman Iceland
• Venice and the Islamic World
• A 19th-century Judaeo-Arabic commercial letter from the Cairo Genizah
• Tales of Jewish Sudan

Jacob Remes:

• Five years after Fukushima forced its evacuation, a town takes down its pro-nuclear slogans.
• Flood damage costs will rise even faster than flood waters.
• Ghetto parties and "N-moments"
• How sexual harassment in academia works
• Actual trigger warnings
• Running the university like a business
• North Carolina voter suppression at work
• Killing jailed immigrants [radio 24:54]

Shashwati:

• The turmoil Indian campuses have seen in the last year or so, came to a head with the arrest of three student leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi. A quick recap of the events with links.
• It all began with this poem. Of course.
• The student leaders who were arrested for the crime of sedition. A quick history.
• The historical background of student politics in India. And just so all those acronyms make sense.
• There is nothing new about the sort of problems educational institutions have been having under the BJP government that came into power in 2014. The problems that the Murty Classical Library is facing is happening concurrently with the controversy in JNU.
• India is having its Italian moment from the 1920s.
• Why the current moment is so important.
• Why has the government come to a knife fight with a gun? Is it the Dalit and Left alliance it finds so threatening?
• Meanwhile, a chill is in the air as teachers, artists and thinkers continue to be targeted, like this professor.
• There have been teach-ins and lectures from Delhi to New York. And also Tihar Jail: In which the Delhi police force and jail authorities find out about ‘Subaltern Studies’ 
• Can pop culture be far behind?

 

Reclaim UC:

• "The University of California paid hedge fund managers about $1 billion in fees over the last 12 years."
• "DeVry’s wealth is student poverty. But this is similarly true of UC Davis, and perhaps that is the secret kinship Katehi recognizes."
• "Why has the [College of Ethnic Studies] been asked to bear the brunt or the lion’s share of budget cuts to SFSU since 2009?"
• "[M]ost college English Departments…run on exploitation."
• "The neoliberal university will grind us down until there’s nothing left. Choose solidarity."
• "College president wins an award for cutting tenured faculty jobs"
• "The GRE is a proxy for asking 'Are you rich?' 'Are you white?' 'Are you male?'"
• Ivy League schools submit amicus brief opposing grad student unionization at Columbia
• Duke University's executive vice president hit parking attendant with car, called her racial slur
• The FBI has a new plan to spy on high school students across the country
• Antifa KKK fighters draw worldwide support