In Conversation with Homi Bhabha
Democracy, fragility, conspiracy — three themes for our times
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Democracy, fragility, conspiracy — three themes for our times
https://www.youtube.com/embed/-EL5nc3wwTk
Biographies:
Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the English and Comparative Literature Departments at Harvard University. He was founding director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University from 2011-2019 and director of the Harvard Humanities Center from 2005-2011. From 2008-2019, he held the inaugural position of Senior Adviser on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University and from 2005-2008 served as Senior Adviser in the Humanities at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. His works include Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004. His next book will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Bhabha has written on contemporary art for Artforum and has written a range of essays on William Kentridge, Anish Kapoor, Taryn Simon, and Mathew Barney, amongst others. He is a member of the Academic Committee for the Shanghai Power Station of Art, advisor on the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (CMAP) project at the Museum of Modern Art New York, and Curator in Residence of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Bhabha served on jury for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and the 2018 Sharjah Biennial. In 2019, he was honored by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London for his influential work in studies of colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization.
With the support of the Volkswagen and Mellon Foundations, Bhabha is leading a research project on the Global Humanities. In 1997 he was profiled by Newsweek as one of “100 Americans for the Next Century.” He holds honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, and the Free University Berlin. In 2012 he was awarded the Government of India’s Padma Bhushan Presidential Award in the field of literature and education and received the Humboldt Research Prize in 2015. In 2018 Bhabha received an honorary doctorate at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa.
Elizabeth Frazer has been Official Fellow and Tutor in Politics since 1991; prior to that she was Rank Manning Junior Research Fellow at New College Oxford. She studied PPE at Pembroke College 1981-84, and completed her Doctorate, in Sociology, in 1987.
Wale Adebanwi is the Professor of Race Relations and former Director of the African Studies Centre, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and Fellow of St Antony’s College.
He studied at the Universities of Lagos, Ibadan and Cambridge and previously taught at the University of California, Davis, USA, and University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Adebanwi’s research has focused on a range of topics addressing the question of the social mobilization of interest and power in contemporary Africa as manifested in nationalism and ethnicity, race, identity politics, elites and cultural politics, democracy, the newspaper press and spatial politics.
Chair: Stephen Tuck is a Professor of Modern History, tutor in History and fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Oxford. He is also affiliated with the Rothermere American Institute. With French historian François Weil, Tuck is the convenor of the European Network on Writing American History.[2] Additionally, Tuck is the author of three books, and the co-editor of a fourth book with professor Kevin M. Kruse of Princeton University.
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