Our first academic retreat took place virtually during the week of May 20–24, 2024. This retreat introduced interested participants to our network’s collaborative research projects and offered support and mentorship to new research projects on Mithila Studies. This retreat paved the way forward for an in-person research workshop at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Our retreat was designed as an opportunity for interested participants — those with whom we had already engaged and those we had yet to meet — to develop their own research projects on Mithila Studies and to seek any kind of support and assistance from our collaborative network. Over the course of approximately two hours in retreat, we shared our individual research ideas, brainstormed thematic, methodological and theoretical overlaps, and considered scholarly formats together.