Welcome to the May edition of our monthly events! This month’s conversation, titled “Caste and Language” will take place on 4.30 PM EDT—Thursday May, 2026 at AB 6051, Academic Building, 15, Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. This conversation is part of our Anti-Caste Awareness Month at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Our Speakers are
Navjit Kaur
Navjit Kaur is an incoming faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers-New Brunswick. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. She also serves as an adjunct lecturer in the University Writing Center at Columbia University, Department of English, and Comparative Literature, where she teaches academic writing to first-year undergraduate students. Navjit holds a PhD in Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Humanities from Princeton University, specializing in South Asian Studies. Her prospective book manuscript, titled "Narrating Labor’s Remainders: Agonistic Sorority and Poetics of Identity among Muslim Women in Indian Punjab," draws on twenty-six months of fieldwork among lower-caste Muslim women and their Dalit neighbors in Malerkotla, a Muslim town in Punjab. Against the disappearance of labor as an analytic within contemporary financial capitalism, the book examines how these women articulate a persistent demand for work—and how this demand is muted, re-scripted, and ultimately overridden by the language of financial inclusion deployed by NGOs and state officials.
Sahil Patel
Sahil Patel is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University where he is advised by Prerna Nadathur. His primary work focuses on verbal semantics in Indo-Aryan language, especially the interaction between tense and aspect. He also works on the intonation-semantics-pragmatics interface, specifically how people negotiate access to information in discourse and use different prosodic cues to draw attention towards information that should be salient. Additionally, he is also interested in slurring terms which emerge from caste surnames and gender stereotypes in India.
Ryan Smith
Ryan Walter Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. His work focuses on the expression of meaning in language, focusing in particular on stativity and change of state, constructions related to memory, gradability, and plurality, among others. His work is primarily informed by fieldwork on the Iranian languages, particularly Persian (Farsi) and Central Kurdish (Sorani), along with the Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia (Hindi-Urdu, Banjara).
Moderated by Nayana Kirasur, PhD Student at Rutgers University.
The event is hosted by the Global Anti-Caste Thought Graduate Working Group, Global Asias, Rutgers University and co-hosted by Linguistics Graduate Students Association, Anthropology Graduate Students Association, and Rutgers Anti-Caste Collective, previously referred to as Fatima Ambedkar Birsa Periyar Phule Savitribai Students and Workers Association, Rutgers University.
Link to the GetInvolved page: https://rutgers.campuslabs.com/engage/event/12445123
