In January of this year, the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS), LUMS published the inaugural issue of its newsletter, Guftugu. The purpose of the newsletter was to highlight the activities of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Economics for the semester before. Last month (June 2018) saw the publication of the second issue of Guftugu. As was the case with the first issue, this second issue also featured write-ups on conferences that were arranged by MGSHSS, including the International Punjabi Conference and the Pakistan Beyond Seventy conference (partnered with The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies).
This issue also featured write-ups on special events, such as when Professor Aamir Mufti of the UCLA visited the School, or when Omar Kasmani delivered his seminar on Trans Identities in Pakistan. Several events were arranged by the Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature and by the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative in Spring 2018, accounts of which are also featured in this issue. The pages on Faculty News feature the publications of the faculty in the semester before as well as any fellowships or grants that they have won and any conferences that they have attended. There were also short write-ups on the achievements of our faculty in terms of both research and teaching, including a write-up on the UNDP Report on Pakistan that was co-authored by Professor Faisal Bari as well as a write-up on the joint course between LUMS and the OP Jindal Law School in India, being led on behalf of LUMS by Professor Ali Usman Qasmi. Two detailed interviews are also part of this issue of the newsletter, one of Professor Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem and the other of Professor Hadia Majid, in which the faculty members spoke about their teaching, research, and their on-going work. A special write-up was solicited on the scholar par excellence, Professor Saba Mahmood—a UC Berkeley professor who tragically passed away earlier this year. Guftugu also endeavours to give a voice to students. In this issue, students submitted write-ups and pictures on the Aurat March in Lahore, a workshop with Professor Taymiya Zaman on Mughal History, and the student team from Economics that won multiple awards in the South Asian Economics Students Meet (SAESM) held in Bangladesh earlier this year.
