As it’s being presented in partnership with the India International Centre, New Delhi, the Symposium is open to all, and you don’t need to register.
Dedicated to the memory of Dubravka Ugrešić (27.3.1949 – 17.3.23)
31st March 2023
11:15 am
Opening remarks
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Vidyan Ravinthiran: ‘Against Citation’
12:40 pm to 1:40 pm
Jane Goldman: ‘“floating like flowers on water”: lyric activism, textual editing, translation and the politics of otium’
1:40 pm to 2:30 pm
LUNCH
2:30 pm to 3:30 pm
Sumana Roy: ‘The Poet-Professor in the Indian Provinces’
3:40 pm to 4:40 pm
Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Martin Crowley, Rita Kothari: ‘The Writer-Critic Across Languages’, moderated by Amit Chaudhuri
1st April 2023
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Michel Chaouli: ‘The Bastard of History: What James Baldwin Taught Me About Poetic Criticism’
12:40 pm to 1:40 pm
Amit Chaudhuri: ‘On what it means to have been a writer in the age of globalisation: Rereading Tom Paulin and Virginia Woolf’
1:40 pm to 2:30 pm
LUNCH
2:30 pm to 3:30 pm
Lisa Borst: ‘Organizing in the Program Era’
3:40 pm to 4:40 pm
Matthew Beaumont: ‘In Praise of Unlearning: The Writer-Critic and the Essay’
Speakers
Matthew Beaumont, a Professor of English Literature at University College London, is the author of several books, including Nightwalking (2015) and The Walker (2020). A short story, his first foray into fiction, was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize in 2018. He has recently written a novel.
Ashutosh Bhardwaj writes in various forms of prose, from conflict zone reporting and investigative journalism to fiction and literary criticism.
Lisa Borst is the web editor of n+1 magazine, where she has also contributed writing about self-publishing, zine culture, and other topics.
Michel Chaouli teaches literature and philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. His book Thinking With Kant’s Critique of Judgment was published by Harvard University Press in 2017. In his next book, he develops the idea and the practice of poetic criticism. It is entitled Something Speaks To Me and will come out with the University of Chicago Press next year.
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, and musician. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University. He conceptualises the ‘literary activism’ symposia.
Rosinka Chaudhuri is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She has written and published extensively on literary culture, history, and poetry in three monographs and several edited books and anthologies.
Martin Crowley is Professor of Modern French Thought and Culture at the University of Cambridge. He is the author most recently of Accidental Agents: Ecological Politics Beyond the Human (2022), and serves as General Editor of the journal French Studies.
Jane Goldman, poet and academic, Reader at the School of Critical Studies, Glasgow University, and a founding General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of Virginia Woolf’s works, has published widely in avant-garde poetics, modernism, and Woolf studies, and is author of three volumes of poetry: Border Thoughts (2014), SEKXPHRASTIKS (2021), and Catullus 64 (2023).
Rita Kothari is Professor of English and Director, Centre for Translation, Ashoka University. She has written many books and articles, the latest of which is Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature (2022).
Vidyan Ravinthiran teaches at Harvard. He is the author of two collections of verse. Worlds Woven Together, a selection of his essays on poetry, came out last year, as did Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose. Asian/Other, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir, is forthcoming from Icon in the UK and Norton in the US.
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
