The American College Archives

Dr. David Gere, PhD, is the director of the Art & Global Health Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He founded the center in 2006. He is also a professor in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he teaches courses on art and global health. His book How to Make Dances in an Epidemic (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) received the award for outstanding book publication from the Congress on Research in Dance. It was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and received a special citation from the Society of Dance History Scholars. His co-edited volumes include Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World (1995); Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (2003); and Through Positive Eyes (2019). In the visual art world, Dr. Gere has co-curated four major exhibitions and took them to multiple locations in South Africa – the Durban Art Gallery, Museum Africa in Johannesburg, and the Slave Lodge in Cape Town – as well as the Fowler Museum at UCLA. He studied music, dance, and the Tamil language in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, on an Oberlin Shansi Fellowship from 1980 to 1982 and, in 2004, was based in Bengaluru as a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar.

Nearly 50 years ago, Dr. Gere taught ethical studies and organized arts programs at the American College in Madurai. Now, as the founding director of UCLA’s Art & Global Health Center, he is revisiting, as part of his Fulbright-Nehru project, the arts of South India with a special emphasis on the programs and projects intended to improve health and save lives. Alongside his research, he is sharing ideas generated from his experience in art and global health with the students and faculty in India.

Anya Fredsell is a doctoral student in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her academic interests include South Asian religions, Tamil language and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnography of religion. Her research relies on ethnographic methodologies to examine relationships among families, land, and deities in contemporary Tamil Nadu, India. Anya received her BA in religious studies from Elon University and an MTS in global religions from Emory’s Candler School of Theology.

Anya’s Fulbright-Nehru research project on place-based Hindu deities is examining, through ethnographic fieldwork, the shifting relationships between families, land, and religious practices in contemporary South India. Her research is analyzing the worship of Tamil lineage deities (kula devams) – the gods who are passed down generationally in families and who reside on ancestral land – to explore how conceptions of lineage and religious devotion are intimately tied to land and negotiated through the worship of place-based deities in South India. Despite contemporary processes of urbanization and migration that relocate families away from their native land, Tamil people continue to worship these deities by returning to ancestral villages or conducting elaborate rituals to permanently move their deities closer to the family. Drawing on her established research contacts and advanced Tamil language proficiency, Anya is following such movements of people and place-based deities by observing festivals and life-cycle rites, and through semi-structured interviews on family histories and deity narratives. The study is taking place in a village near the urban center of Madurai, Tamil Nadu. This project will form the basis of Anya’s doctoral dissertation at Emory University and is expected to culminate in her first book.