Rasta, 1966-2000, bedsheet design for Fabindia, by Riten Mozumdar. Photo courtesy heirs of Riten Mozumdar.
To view the mission statement, please click on the link: On Not Mentioning the Modern: Mission statement
25th February: To join please click the https://zoom.us
Opening remarks – 4.45-5 pm Indian Standard Time
Partha Mitter: ‘Swimming in the Waters of Modernity’ – 5.00-5.50pm
Kaiser Haq: ‘The Perpetual Catwalk of Modernity’ – 5.50-6.40 pm
Yi-Ping Ong: ‘Fictions of Modernity: An Immigrant Reads Joyce and Akutagawa’ – 6.45-7.35 pm
Laetitia Zecchini: ”Listening to Indian Poets: Explorations into Modernism as Struggle’ – 7.35-8.25 pm
Robert O’Meally: ‘Unforgivable Jack Johnson: The Black Heavyweight’s Juneteenth’ – 8.30-9.20 pm
26th February: To join please click the link https://zoom.us
Marjorie Perloff: ‘Modernism after Postmodernism’ – 11.20 am-12.10 pm
Jatindra Kumar Nayak: ‘Negotiating Modernity: The Emergence of the Essay in Odia Literature’ – 12.15-1.05 pm
Amit Chaudhuri: ‘Freedom and Invisibility: Literary Modernity in India’ – 1.05-1.55 pm
Closing remarks – 1.55-2.15 pm
SPEAKERS
Kaiser Haq is Professor of English at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He is interested in writing poetry and non-fiction, and in literary translation. His books include Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems and The Triumph of the Snake Goddess.
Partha Mitter is an author and art historian. He is Professor Emeritus at Sussex University. His books include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (1977, 1992, 2013) and The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947(2007). He was awarded an honorary D Litt from the Courtauld Institute, London
Jatindra Kumar Nayak retired as Professor of English, Utkal University, Odisha in 2016. He won the Hutch- Crossword Book Award in 2004. He has coedited Critical Discourse in Odia, which was published by Routledge in 2021.
Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for thirty years. Director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O’Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey.
Yi-Ping Ong is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2018). Her work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and literature has appeared in PMLA, Philosophy and Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Comparative Literature, nonsite, and Post45.
Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of many books on 20th and 21st century Poetry and Poetics. Her most recent book is Infrathin:An Experiment in Micropoetics (2021), and her edition/ translation of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914-1916 is due out in April 2022.
Laetitia Zecchini is a research fellow at the CNRS in Paris, and visiting scholar at the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. She writes on contemporary Indian literature, especially poetry, postcolonial modernisms and the politics of literature.
Amit Chaudhuri is a writer and musician. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University. He is editor of literaryactivism.com and conceptualises and curates the ‘literary activism’ symposia.
