CFP: Matter(s) of Fact, 20th Annual Graduate Student Conference at Western University, Ontario -March 15-17, 2018

Call For Papers:

“What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.” –

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism

In his treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle details three principal means by which an orator can attempt to persuade an audience: by appealing to credibility and authority (ethos), by engaging the emotions of the audience (pathos), and by deploying logic and fact (logos). While Aristotle believes that presenting a strong body of proof is the most effective way of persuading people given what he argues to be humanity’s natural inclination towards Truth (Rhetoric I.1, 1355a15f.), he also concedes that those who have a masterful command of rhetoric can use their skills to arouse incendiary emotions, distract attention away from the subject, and override the rationality of any given audience. In drawing attention to the problematic manipulability of truth perceptions, Aristotle invites us to consider the epistemological affinity between belief and experience, as well as the ethical implications of all forms of communication.

Coinciding with such diverse phenomena as the rise of digital culture, the upsurge of political populism, and the hyper-technologization of modern life, competing narratives of factuality and truth have gained frontline visibility in our day-to-day reality. The discussions surrounding truths and facts have even inspired the Oxford English Dictionary to declare “post-truth”—an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”—as 2016’s Word of the Year. This parallels, in a supremely ironic way, the fabricated epigraph that Jean Baudrillard uses to open Simulacra and Simulation, the insight of which resonates even stronger now in our day with the accelerating digital age: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” In the age of artificial intelligence, social media, and reality television, the notions of simulacra and creation of narratives impact ever more strata of our lives and bring to the fore questions such as: What kind of “new reality” exists in the era of post-truth, and how is that translated in cultural production? Is postmodernity, given its constant interrogation of realities and truths, the most productive way of helping us make sense of shifting epistemes? What responsibilities and challenges arise with the novel ways that knowledge—and perhaps by extension, truth—is produced and communicated? Are we, indeed, in an era of “post-truth”? Are we done with facts?

Furthermore, in the realm of narratives and material production, questions around literariness and fiction arise: if fiction is inevitably infused with a certain degree of reality, then is fiction, in turn, able to modify the Real? How are facts integrated into fiction and what happens when fiction interpenetrates with facts? In what ways can we speak about literariness as a post-factual regime? What have been some of the literary strategies deployed towards fictionalizing facts, truth, or epistemes? On the flipside, in what ways has fiction been historicized as fact, truth, or “real”? How have these polyvalent strategies evolved, if at all, over time?

This conference invites papers on literary, historical, and theoretical investigations of narratives, hermeneutics, and myths of facts and truths. Topics of discussion may include but are not exclusive to:

1) Myths and narratives: literary/historical/theoretical intersections of mythification; postmodernism and truths; hyperreality; simulacra-as-truth; rhetorics; “Post-truth”; hermeneutics of suspicion; populism and propaganda; emotion vs. logic; demagoguery and xenophobia; opportunistic narratives; the trans/de-valuation of facts-as-truths and truths-as-facts; truth-value; philosophy of language; trans-human, post-human, alternate ecologies

2) Wikileaks and whistleblowing in the digital age: digital humanities; ethics in the digital world; truth in the digital age; piracy and hacking; AI; AI and paranoia narratives

3) Critique of institutions: (post-)faculties; ideology, institutions and institutionalization; writings on art history and literary history; approaches to history writing; museums and art history; capitalism; avant-garde theory; culture industry and the Frankfurt School.

4) Material culture in the post-truth era: virtual objects; mythical and/or “real” and/or virtual artifacts; material culture and virtuality; artifacts and their faculties; art forgery; facts and things; representation of objects, objects as representation; surrealism and its legacies.

Related fields of interest may include but are not limited to: Comparative Literature and Literary Theory; Critical Theory; English, French; and Spanish Studies; Studio arts; Sociology; Anthropology; Political Science; Queer Theory and Gender studies; Interdisciplinary Studies; Digital Humanities; Cultural Studies; Linguistics; History; Philosophy; Film and Media studies; etc.

We are asking those interested in delivering 15 to 20-minute presentations to submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to themattersoffact@gmail.com by January 3, 2018. Please include your name, abstract keywords, institutional affiliation, technical requirements, and a 50-word bio in your email. Abstracts and presentations in English, Spanish, and French are welcome.

Abstract submission deadline: January 3, 2018

Expanded versions of conference presentations will be considered for publication in The Scattered Pelican, the peer-reviewed graduate journal of Comparative Literature at Western University.

Contact Info: 

Busra Copuroglu
bcopurog@uwo.ca
Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature
Western University
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Arts and Humanities Building Room 3R02
London, Ontario

Contact Email: 

themattersoffact@gmail.com

URL: 

https://mattersoffactblog.wordpress.com/

CFP: Love in Translation - Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature Graduate Conference, March 2-3, 2018

New Brunswick, New Jersey

Keynote by Professor Sandra Bermann (Princeton University)

Translation workshop by Professor Susan Bernofsky (Columbia University)

The biennial graduate student conference at the Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature seeks to understand how love figures in and is transfigured by translation. The conference invites participants to think about how love disrupts and transforms the ways in which literary imagination functions across languages, time, space, borders. Some of the questions we aim to address are: How is love translated? Can love be a methodology in translation? Is it a hindrance or is it generative? Is love a theme or a product of translation?

Graduate students interested in presenting their research at Love in Translation are asked to submit an abstract of 300 words that addresses the conference theme.

• Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Love and the ethics of translation
• Love and literary pedagogy as translation
• Love in the text
• Love, translation, popular culture
• Love, translation, world literature
• Love, translation, activism
• Love, translation, gender
• Love, translation, environment
• Love, translation, genre
• Love, translation, borders (textual, epistemic, geographical/geopolitcal)

The deadline for paper proposals is 11:59 PM on December 15th, 2017. Please e-mail all proposals to Conference Co-Chairs Penny Yeung or Rudrani Gangopadhyay at rucomplit2018@gmail.com . All submissions should include the title of the paper, the abstract, and the name, affiliation, and email of the author.

Contact Info: 

Rudrani Gangopadhyay and Penny Yeung

Conference Co-Chairs

Contact Email: 

rucomplit2018@gmail.com

URL: 

https://loveintranslationconference.wordpress.com

Sponsored AIW Workshop- April 10-13, 2018. -Ghent University

Concept Note:

The 2018 AIW is titled “Arrows of Time: Narrating the Past and Present,” and the organizers want to explore this theme on three related fronts.

Firstly, the organizers would particularly like to highlight the historical connections –political, cultural, and academic – between the Low Countries, modern day Belgium and the Netherlands, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Interest in Early Modern Indigenous interactions with the Dutch in New Amsterdam is growing, but some lesser-known intersections have recently begun to draw wider attention. For example, in 2016, Ghent played host to a popular exhibition on Father Pieter-Jan de Smet and his mission to the Americas. At the same time, the city’s football team came under fire for its use of an ‘Indian’ logo and mascots, giving rise to debate regarding its origins and appropriateness. Other connections, such as Margaret of Austria’s collection of artefacts from the New World kept at her court in Mechelen, or Frans Olbrecht’s fieldwork among the Eastern Cherokee, have garnered comparatively little scholarly attention.

Secondly, the 2018 AIW organizers invite contributions that problematize the uses and notions of ‘history,’ especially with reference to present day conflicts. This a very timely subject as the contested past is increasingly coming to the fore in the contested present. For example, the Idle No More and NoDAPL movements of the last five years rely heavily on the relatively recent past in their discourses about the present, and projected/envisioned/anticipated futures. Meanwhile, research published in Nature in 2017 that may push the peopling of the Americas back by 100,000 years has ignited a firestorm of controversy among the scientific community, and it may well become more widespread. The Clovis First and Bering Strait Land Bridge theories already play a prominent role in public discourses regarding ‘indigeneity’ in North America, and the possible impact of these new findings on ongoing debates remains to be seen. Additionally, there is growing interest in how non-Western and syncretic communities conceptualize such notions as ‘the past.’

Thirdly, the organizers wish to explore the pedagogical and institutional side of history. The decolonization of academia is starting to gain traction, with increased discussion among educational policy makers on how to diversify curricula. How can this be achieved with reference to secondary and university history classes without trivializing the subject material and how can these topics be presented to a wider audience? Additionally, how can we accomplish the decolonization of the past within academia itself – especially in light of the recent controversies surrounding appointments at Dartmouth and elsewhere?

Papers are welcome from any field on any topic relating to history and the Native Peoples of North America. However, priority will be given to those that also address the 2018 conference’s central themes. The organizers particularly wish to invite submissions for paper, panels, and poster presentations on – but not limited to – the following subjects: 

• Contested histories
• Discourses on the past in function of present conflict
• Low Countries connections
• Reception and representation of the past
• Time and history as concepts
• Memory communities
• Practices of history
• Philosophies of history
• Decolonizing academia, and the field of ‘history’ in particular
• Decolonizing museums
• Pedagogies of history and decolonizing classrooms

Submission Deadlines:

The submission deadline for paper/panel proposals is December 15, 2017. 

The submission deadline for poster proposals is January 31, 2018. 

Paper/panel presenters will be notified of acceptance by January 15, 2018, and poster presenters by February 15, 2018. 

Proposals for papers/panels and posters (max. 400 words) should be submitted together with a short biography (max. 250 words) to ThomasDonald.Jacobs@ugent.be.

Venue & Sponsorship:

The 39th edition of the AIW, titled “Arrows of Time: Narrating the Past and Present,” will be held in Ghent, Belgium. It is being hosted by Ghent University, and is being sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, the History Department, Institute for Early Modern History, and TAPAS – Thinking About The Past. The workshop will take place from April 10-13, 2018. 

For more Details: https://aiw2018.org/

Funded International Conference 'Modalities of Displacement in South Asia' - June 7-8, 2018

Call For Abstracts:

The displacement of large numbers of people is a central feature of the rapid economic expansion that characterises contemporary South Asia. Rooted in violent processes of state formation, including partition, militarisation, and the repression of regional secessionist movements, South Asia’s modern polities are actively consolidating and incorporating erstwhile economically and politically marginal spaces. These processes of consolidation have been accompanied by the emergence of religious nationalisms and ethnic identity politics that legitimize the ideological or even physical segregation of ‘others’, conjoining land struggles and development projects with socio-cultural contestations around home and belonging. The conference ‘Modalities of Displacement’ interrogates some of these complexities through the notion of ‘displacement’.

While displacement has emerged as a keyword across research in historical, anthropological, geographical, and cultural studies, as well as in fields of migration, urban and rural development, and memory or heritage, inter-disciplinary dialogues are often rare. In this conference, we intend to bring together different disciplinary perspectives and empirical case studies, to think about what the modalities of displacement in contemporary South Asia can be. We think of physical displacement (e.g. in migration studies), ideological displacement (e.g. in anthropological discussions about the politics of belonging), emotional displacement (e.g. in considerations of the ‘unheimlich’ in cultural studies), economic displacement (e.g. in studies of land issues and dispossession), and aesthetic displacement (e.g. in urban geography). The panels of the conference will be organised to produce interdisciplinary conversations on these different and overlapping modalities of displacement, providing a platform for established and emerging researchers to connect and share insights.

This two-day conference is organised in the context of the projects Postcolonial Displacements: Migration, Narratives and Place-Making in South Asia (LIAS/CA-DS) and Rerouting Relations (IIAS) at Leiden University. We particularly welcome submissions that address perspectives from urban peripheries, rural hinterlands, borderlands, transnational contexts, and the margins of national imaginations. Apart from a select set of panels dedicated to the modalities of displacement, we will also host a workshop at IIAS (upon invitation) on residential segregation and religious politics. Furthermore we invite presentations based on audio-visual materials, such as films or art works.

Send your abstracts (300 words) to: displacement@hum.leidenuniv.nl, along with key-words, a short bio, contact details, and, if applicable, information about the duration and nature of the audio-visual materials.

Deadline for submissions: 22 January, 2018.  

Selection: Mid February 2018 (tentative).

Funding: Very limited partial funding is available for a small number of participants.

Convenors:

Dr. Erik de Maaker, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (CA-DS), Leiden University.

Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason, Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden University.

Dr. Sanderien Verstappen (coordinator), Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden University, fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden.

Contact Email: s.b.verstappen@hum.leidenuniv.nl

URL: 

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2017/11/call-for-papers-modalities-of-displacement-in-south-asia

Funded UK - US Early Career Research Collaboration Workshop,10th–Sunday 11th February 2018, USA

Saturday 10th–Sunday 11th February 2018

136 Irving Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Call For Applications:

The British Academy, in collaboration with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, is inviting applications for early career researchers in the humanities and social sciences to attend a research collaboration workshop on the broad theme of violence. The workshop format will enable the exchange of ideas across disciplinary as well as national boundaries with the aim to help create and build exchange, cooperation and partnership between the researchers attending in the short- and long-term.

Purpose and Focus

Violence is a near ever-present reality for much of humanity, but there are significant limits to how narratives and experiences of violence are understood in the public imagination and policy process. This workshop will investigate how violence is defined and conceptualised by fostering an interdisciplinary discussion of some key themes related to our understanding of violence, and considering the implications for research and policy engagement.

Some seed funding will be made available at the end of the workshop to support collaborations between UK and US scholars on a competitive basis for research proposals formulated by participants, which will be presented in a group session on the final afternoon of the workshop. This funding is only one of the ways in which the Academy will provide mechanisms for participants to continue the conversations and research ideas developed through the workshop and of course the participants will be welcome to discuss and collaborate outside any Academy support.

The Workshop

The workshop will take place in Boston from 10th–11th February 2018. The British Academy will meet the costs for travel, accommodation and subsistence for all participants over the course of the workshop. 

Application Process

Applicants should provide a CV which should not exceed two sides of paper. Applicants are also asked to provide a justification (not exceeding two sides of paper) explaining:

• Why they are interested in violence based on their research and/or teaching areas;
• What disciplinary and interdisciplinary skills and/or experience they would contribute to the workshop; and,
• How the workshop could help to develop their own research and career development.

Applications should be sent to c.moorhouse@britac.ac.uk no later than 5pm (GMT) on Wednesday 6 December.

Contact Info: 

Christina Moorhouse

c.moorhouse@britac.ac.uk

Contact Email: c.moorhouse@britac.ac.uk

URL: 

https://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2017-10-17%20Call%20for%20Applications%20-%20UK-US%20ECR%20Violence%20Works...

Funded International Conference on Translating Feminism: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives on Text, Place and Agency- 13-15 June 2018-University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Organised by the Leverhulme Trust International Network

'Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation' 

University of Glasgow, United Kingdom 

13-15 June 2018 

CALL FOR PAPERS

The transformation of women's sense of self - individually and collectively - is one of the most significant socio-cultural events of the past 50 years to have occurred around the globe. Western-focused historiographies of 'second-wave' feminisms have only made the first few steps in addressing the geographical biases in their self-narration and in the very definition of feminism. A whole world unfolds when one considers the many guises of female agency aimed at social transformation, and articulated through text. 

The focus of this Conference is on the translocal, transcultural and translingual connections between such texts and their authors. In what ways do texts connect activists operating in different local environments? How are actors influenced by intellectual and political sources originating from other localities and different cultural environments? What happens to a text when it is adapted to a new environment and is politically operationalised in different circumstances? 

We adopt a broad understanding of 'text', which includes both published and unpublished work, recorded and unrecorded words, and can range from literary fiction to oral testimony and activist pamphlets. Feminism, too, is defined here in very broad terms - including any action aimed at subverting the gender status quo and foregrounding female agency. Finally, we understand translation as a process of cultural transfer across languages, but also within the lexicons and registers of single languages. While the prime focus of the Network has been on the period since 1945, papers incorporating longer-term perspectives and earlier periods are very welcome. 

Confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Claudia de Lima Costa (UMass Amherst) 

Panels and themes will include: 

* Intersectional approaches in translation 

* Feminist vocabularies and dictionaries 

* Patterns of transmission/questions of centre and periphery 

* Self-translation/intimate translation 

* Intergenerational translation 

* Pedagogies of feminist translation 

* Sexism in/and language 

* Feminism and specialized translation (e.g., medical or legal translation) 

* Feminisms and literary translation 

* Feminism, translation and international institutions (e.g., the UN International Women's Year 1975) 

* Men and feminism 

* Multilingual contexts and the absence of translation 

* Multilingual spaces of negotiation (e.g., book fairs) 

* Social media 

Please note the Conference will also feature a strand on 'Feminist Translating: Activists and Professionals', organized in collaboration with Glasgow's Centre for Gender History, and involving roundtable discussions and workshops with activist-translator communities and publishers working with a feminist ethos. All Conference delegates will be welcome to attend, and its programme will be announced alongside the main Conference programme. 

Please send us your abstract by 15 January. You will be notified of acceptance by 15 February. The programme will be announced and registration will open on 1 March. 

Your abstract should be between 250 and 350 words. Please include your email address and (if applicable) institutional affiliation, as well as a three-sentence biography. All abstracts, as well as queries, should be sent to: translatingfeminism@gmail.com

'Feminist Translating: Activists and Professionals': If you would like to be involved in the activist-translator strand please contact us separately by email. 

Limited funding to cover travel and accommodation is available for researchers working on temporary contracts, and for academics working outside Europe and North America. If you wish to benefit from this please clarify in your cover letter how you meet these criteria. 

Organisers:

Dr Maud Bracke, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Glasgow 

Dr Penelope Morris, Senior Lecturer in Italian, University of Glasgow 

Dr Emily Ryder, Network Facilitator, Lecturer in Italian, University of Glasgow 

Ruth Abou Rached - Translation and Intercultural Studies 

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures 

University of Manchester 

International Conference on Indian Literature as World Literature: Past, Present, Future -18 to 20 January 2018. EFL University, Hyderabad, Telangana

Call For Abstracts:

In recent years Indian Literature in English has been generating renewed interest in its writers and writings not just among students and scholars of literature but also intellectuals and thinkers working in other areas of Humanities and Social Sciences. There has also been a huge global increase in sales of literary works produced by Indian writers living in India as well as writers of Indian origin living outside the country. This new era in Indian Writing, as we all know, was ushered in by the epic-success of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children published in 1981. Today, interestingly, many of the works published in the 80s and 90s, especially Rushdie’s own magnum opus, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and others feature on the reading lists of departments of World Literature in universities across the globe.

Not very long ago, classical literatures of India produced over the last two millennia, had generated a similar interest among scholars of British India. English translations of The Rāmāyaṇa, The Mahābhārata, Pañcatantra, Kathāsaritsāgara, Jātaka Tales, Abhijñānashākuntala, Raghuvaṃśa, Mṛcchakaṭika, Svapnavāsavadattam, Harṣacarita, Pṛthvīrāj Rāso and Padmavat began to come into the public domain as early as the last quarter of the 1800s and after. The contribution of indologists and translators like Ralph Griffith, Arthur Ryder, E. B. Cowell, Charles Henry Tawney, Sir William Jones and others in the preservation and dissemination of India’s most loved classical texts across the limits and boundaries of the ancient languages is unquestionably one of the most important milestones in the journey of Indian literatures. Sadly, however, these extraordinary texts, or at least parts of them, despite their incomparable literary quality and universal appeal have rarely been featured on reading lists of World Literature departments.

The fate of literatures produced in the regional languages of India has not been very different. Most of the literature produced in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and a host of other languages has to a large extent remained unknown both to readers outside the language of its origin as well as to the English-speaking world simply for lack of translation across  languages within India and of course, into English. Can an understanding of World Literatures ever be complete without having known the worlds of Kalidas, Kabir, Meera, Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Ghalib, Kaifi Azmi, Gulzar, Sri Sri, Gurram Jashuva, Kuvempu, Premchand, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Nirala, Sumitranandan Pant, Maithili Sharan Gupt, Bhisham Sahni and O V Vijayan,  to name a few?

Thus, the range of possibilities and array of questions that glare at those engaged in a serious and sincere promotion of the idea of “world literature” are overwhelming and intriguing at the same time. But the ride, however bumpy and bouncy it may seem, has also been immensely rewarding in terms of the varied points of arrivals, the reactive and commendatory responses, fresh challenges and new possibilities in the domain of world literatures.

Today, “world literature”, presents itself as a field of study with major thrust on global circulation, transcultural reading methods, wide ranging stylistic patterns, “intertextuality,” and interesting affiliations between texts and readers, hitherto not so evident. Indian writers, in their elaborate visions of particular locales/settings, have all along been challenging the notions of worldliness as something divorced from the local and the indigenous as something insulated from the world as the West would prefer to view them. These writers preferred rather to display the synergies between the local, national, regional, and global, and show how the local and the familiar function as the co-ordinates of the world. Being quite in consonance with one of the major pursuits of postcolonial literatures - fostering an understanding of the traffic between the local and the global, and that of world literature insisting that power and the way one is socially situated affect how one reads and writes the world - Indian literature does not seem to have any different purpose or end from that of world literature. The world then becomes not something exotic, menacing, and inhospitable but an accretion of what we consider home, a larger community to which we are all native.

The conference aims to explore the promising avenues of exchange between Indian literary studies and world literature. What role can writers, readers, critics, scholars, teachers, translators, literary agents, publishers, journalists, film makers, print and electronic media professionals etc. can play in promoting Indian literatures in English and translation at the global level? Consequently, the Conference looks to bring experts from various fields on to a single stage, all looking to share their learning and expertise in addressing the concerns. 

Well-researched and unpublished papers are invited on topics related to all aspects of Indian literature and literary criticism in English, in translation as well as regional language literatures. However, all submissions must strictly be in English only. If you choose to make an impact submit your abstract in not more than 250 words along with the keywords.  Do not forget to mention your name, place, affiliation, mobile number, and email address.  All submissions and correspondence may be made at efluiwlconference2018@gmail.com

Important Dates:

 Deadline for submission of abstracts: 20 November 2017

 Notification of Acceptance: 30 November 2017

 Deadline for Registration: 15 December 2017

 Full paper: 25 December 2017

Registration Fee:

 Faculty Members (Out-station paper presenters) Rs 5000/-

 Research Participants (Out-station paper presenters) Rs 2500/-

 Local Participants (presenters & non-presenters) Rs 1500/-

 EFLU Research Scholars Rs 1000/-

 Foreign Delegates 100 USD

Please pay conference registration fee through Money Transfer to the bank account provided below. You are requested to email us your name and complete transaction details like amount, transaction number, date and name of the bank along with a scanned copy of the counterfoil.

Beneficiary’s Name: Internal Income Account

Acc No.: 62122901303

Type of Account: Savings

State Bank of India

IFSC Code: SBIN0021106

Bank Address: SBI, EFLU Branch, Hyderabad-500007

Payments may also be made through a Demand Draft drawn in favour of Internal Income Account, A/C No.62122901303, SBI, EFLU Branch, Hyderabad and sent to The Conference Coordinator, Dept. of Indian and World Literatures, EFL University, Hyderabad, Telangana - 500007. Please furnish complete transaction details like amount, Transaction number/DD No., date, Name of the Bank etc. in your communication. The Registration Fee includes the conference kit, three lunches, the conference dinner on January 18, and tea & snacks at intervals. Outstation participants will be provided breakfast on all three days. Accommodation will be available from 3 pm on 17 January to 10 pm on 20 January. ¬-Participants making joint presentations need to register separately.

Our Distinguished Conference Speakers

Prof. Graham Huggan, Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures, University of Leeds, UK will deliver the Keynote Address. Prof. Huggan is one of the world’s most renowned critics in the comparative postcolonial literary/cultural studies.

Prof. Vinay Dharwadker, Professor of Comparative Literatures and Folklore Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, is an expert in Indian and South Asian literatures and culture. 

Prof. Aparna Dharwadker, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, specializes in comparative modern drama, modern Indian theatre and contemporary world theatre.

Mr. Ananth Padmanabhan is Chief Executive Officer of HarperCollins India and was former senior vice-President of Penguin India, the biggest multinational publishing houses in India. Mr. Padmanabhan has been at the helm of publishing business in India for more than 20 years now.

Dr. Arshia Sattar specializes in South Asian languages and civilizations and Indian narrative. She is one of the finest experts in Ramayana, an extraordinary translator of ancient texts and author of several books inspired by Indian mythology.

Volga is a popular Telugu novelist, short story writer, poet and translator. She was honoured with the Sahitya Academi Award for her collection of short stories titled Vimuktha.

Ms. Bhawana Somaaya, film journalist, critic, author and historian will deliver the Valedictory Address. Ms. Somaaya was recently honoured with the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian award, by the Honourable President of India Shri. Pranab Mukherjee. She has also served on the advisory panel of the Central Board of Film Certificate.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Prof. N. Ramadevi Murru, Dean, School of Literary Studies

Conference Coordinator

Dr. Chinnadevi Singadi, Assistant Professor

Joint Coordinator

Dr. Thoty Subramaniam

Head, Department of Indian and World Literatures

The EFL University, Hyderabad