Saturday, October 24, 2009

DukeEngage Returns to India's Pearl City, Hyderabad!


In its second year's run, The Loom & the Wheel: Literacy & Livelihood in Hyderabad will once again see Duke undergraduates in the Pearl City in the summer of 2010 (June 7- August 7) . The program, co-directed by Leela (Dept of Religion, Duke) and Prasad (Vivekin Group) is a collaboration with the Association for India’s Development and the Smile for Life Foundation. Like in 2008, we will work with elementary school children in economically underprivileged communities on communicative English and storytelling skills, basic science experiments, and visual-art and theater-art projects. The goal: to make the experience of education fun, fruitful, and far-reaching, even transformative, for everybody involved in this collaboration.

Hyderabad is a beautiful city, known to its historians and its fans as the city that materializes the cusp between Muslim and Hindu cultures. Although these are two prominent populations of Hyderabad, it is home to other religious communities like Sikhs, Christians and Parsis, for example. One of the fastest growing cities of India, Hyderabad has become a global technology site in which its new glass architecture now sits intriguingly amidst its magnificent 500-year old stone monuments.

Our DukeEngage team will explore these and other juxtapositions and intersections, the glories and the worries they produce, and discover the rhythms of Hyderabadi daily life, food, its world-famous pearls and bangles, and the arts.


For more details, see http://www.duke.edu/~leela/dukeengage/

To apply for this program, click here

Thursday, October 22, 2009

New Faculty Profile: Mona Hassan

On Duke Today, you can read about one of our new faculty members, Mona Hassan, assistant professor of Islamic Studies and History in the Department of Religion:

Mona Hassan: The History of Emotions and Religious Imaginations
Religion professor explores how the Muslim past shapes imaginations of the future
By Andrea Fereshteh