At the European Conference for South Asian Studies 2025, hosted by the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, School of Dance’s Visiting Instructor Sumedha Bhattacharyya presented her paper “Singing in Silence: Kitchen, Shongshaar, and Women’s Memory-Making after the Partition of India (1947)”, exploring how women’s domestic and sonic spaces become archives of post-Partition memory.
As part of her international teaching engagement, Bhattacharyya also taught a class at Barnard College, Columbia University, on Screendance in India, examining courtesan women at the forefront of erasure, their pioneering roles in dance and cinema, and how cinematic representation intertwined with the larger nation-building process.