| Congratulations! | 
Congratulations to our students invited to join Phi Beta Kappa! The history department is proud of its undergraduate scholars! Check out the Scholarship and Awards page of our website to see the Phi Beta Kappa and other award winners.
Each spring, the deparmental awards are announced at the Senior Send-off. Mark your calendar and plan to join us, Thursday, May 1, 5 p.m. in UCC 2520-D. All history majors and minors are invited to attend!
| | | Check out these speakers on Monday! | 
Dr. Tanika Sarkar will discuss the making of a neo-Hindu orthodoxy in early colonial India, which developed in angry reaction to a reformist trend to change certain aspects of mainstream religious beliefs and practices. Later in the century, orthodoxy took a sharper turn to form the new political strand of cultural nationalism. It challenged and criticized the entirety of western social and cultural traditions and contrasted them with the “perfection” of the Hindu religious and social world. Analyzing fragments from these discourses, Dr. Sarkar will explain the changing contexts behind the transformation and briefly note their resonances in today’s Hindu nationalism in India.
Dr. Sarkar is an acclaimed historian of women’s histories and social movements in colonial and post-colonial India. She is Professor Emerita of Modern History, at Jawaharlal Nehru University and has also taught at St. Stephen’s College, both in Delhi, India. She is currently Visiting Professor at Ashoka University (India) and at Grinnell College (USA). Professor Sarkar has also been a Visiting Professor at Yale University, University of Chicago, Göttingen University in Germany, and University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She was also a Professorial Fellow at Trinity College (Cambridge), University of Dublin, Keele University in England, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin, and University of Washington. She delivered the keynote address at the Association of Asian Studies meetings in 2024, and has given keynote addresses for numerous other European and US international conferences.
Katina Lillios, Professor of Anthropology, University of Iowa
| | | Celebrate basketball history with a free screening | March Madness in the Archives: Dribble Screening and Panel Discussion
This March Madness season, celebrate basketball history with the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA)! In partnership with FilmScene and the Bijou Film Board, join us for clips from the 1979 film Dribble (also known as Scoring), a women’s basketball comedy filmed in Cedar Rapids and featuring the Iowa Cornets, who played in the professional Women’s Basketball League from 1978–80. A panel discussion will follow, featuring Lark Birdsong, the first women’s basketball coach at Iowa; Dr. Shelley Lucas, a sports historian who has written about the Cornets; and Dr. Kären Mason, IWA’s first curator, whose work collecting our women’s basketball materials laid crucial groundwork for these stories to be told.
This free screening and panel discussion will be on Tuesday, March 11 at 7 p.m., hosted at FilmScene at the Chauncey. Get tickets to reserve your spot at icFilmScene.org
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