Alka Kurian interviews Pulitzer Prize winner, leads South Asian film events

In December 2020, IAS faculty member Alka Kurian interviewed the Pulitzer Prize winner poet Vijay Seshadri for the Tasveer Author Meets event. In November 2020, Kurian was a panelist for the “Triumph over Misogyny,” “Duties, Dreams and Desires in a Young Woman,” “Displacement and Trauma: Sri Lanka’s Civil War and Partition of India,” and “Courageous Ordinary Lives in Flood-prone Assam,” panels at the South Asian Film Festival of Montreal.

In October 2020 Kurian gave virtual lectures on “Youth, Gender, and Human Rights in India” at the Foreign Service Institute and a virtual guest lecture on Bliss (Mutluluk) for the Human Rights Cinema course, University of Massachusetts, Boston. In the same month, Kurian also moderated a virtual masterclass with India's leading actress and filmmaker Nandita Das for COSAFF (Coalition of South Asian Film Festivals) and organized a virtual symposium entitled “South Asian Diaspora and Black Lives Matter: Literary and Cinematic Perspectives” for Tasveer. This was followed by a virtual panel “Epilogue: Crossing Borders, Talking Genres.” that she moderated for TSAL (Tasveer South Asian Literary Festival).

Kurian continues to post interviews on her podcast South Asian Films and Books, which now has 15 episodes.