The 2026 Bucknell Summer Institute brings together ten scholars from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences to explore mobility as a transformative analytical framework for the study of the Global South. Hosted by the Bucknell Humanities Center and organized by the Mithila Studies Network, the Institute takes Mithila — a transregional cultural zone straddling eastern India and the southeastern Terai of Nepal — as its primary site of inquiry, while advancing methods and frameworks applicable to understudied regions more broadly.

Participants work across anthropology, history, sociology, religious studies, literary studies, and performance studies. Their papers address labor migration, vernacular print culture, oral tradition, literary history, popular culture, and archival practice, united by a shared commitment to centering movement rather than territorial fixity as the analytical starting point.

The Institute is designed to produce a substantial peer-reviewed publication — either a special journal issue or an edited volume — alongside pedagogical and digital research materials to be hosted through the Mithila Studies Network.