The Next Monsoon: Climate Change and Contemporary Cultural Production in South Asia

The focus of this project is on how individuals and communities are responding to a changing climate through visual arts, cinema, literature, architecture and other cultural expressions in South Asia. This blog is dedicated to the collective engagement in academic research deriving from our upcoming conference: “The Next Monsoon: Climate Change and Contemporary Cultural Production in South Asia.”

Prior to the conference, regular meetings of participants in reading groups and the first season of podcasts spearheaded conversations on understanding climate change specifically from a cultural lens. During the 2022-2023 academic year, the four faculty leads convened four virtual reading group meetings, bringing together the  international faculty, as well as other interested faculty and graduate students. These discussions provided a common language and frame of reference for the participants’ individual presentations at the 3-day The Next Monsoon conference in October 2023, and the subsequent publication.

The four faculty organizers consist of former South Asia Program Director Iftikhar Dadi (History of Art), who is the Principal Investigator of this grant. Current South Asia Program Director Sarah Besky (ILR) is a faculty collaborator, along with Sonal Khullar (Art History, University of Pennsylvania) and Rupali Gupte (School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai).