Professor Premesh Lalu is the former Director of the DSI-NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities of the Centre for Humanities Research. Following an MA from the University of the Western Cape, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Doctoral Fellowship to read towards a doctorate in History at the University of Minnesota. In 2003 he successfully defended a doctoral dissertation titled “In the Event of History”. After sixteen years in the Department of History as an Associate Professor, Lalu was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to convene a fellowship programme on the Study of the Humanities in Africa. He was promoted to full professor upon being appointed as Director of the Centre for Humanities Research in 2008. Lalu has published widely in academic journals such as History and Theory, Journal of Southern African Studies, Afrika Focus, Journal of Higher Education in Africa, Kronos: Southern African Histories, Current Writing, Afrika Focus, Journal of Africa, Middle East and Asian Studies, Social Dynamics, and History in Africa. Lalu’s writing has appeared in newspapers and online platforms such as the Mail and Guardian, Dailymaverick, Africa is a Country, Business Day, the Cape Times as well as in edited publications. His book The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009) argues that a postcolonial critique of apartheid is necessary in order to forge a concept of apartheid that allows us to properly formulate a deeper meaning of the post-apartheid. He is co-editor of Remains of the Social: Desiring the Post-Apartheid (2017) and Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and Unmaking Apartheid’s Legacies (2012). Lalu is a board member of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes, former chairperson of the Handspring Trust for Puppetry in Education, and former trustee of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa.
Francesca Orsini is a reader in the literatures of north India at SOAS, University of London, and works with Hindi, Urdu, and Indo-Persian texts. She is interested in the ways in which a multilingual approach to literary history can challenge identitarian approaches to literary history in India and also provide an appropriate model for understanding the dynamics of world literature from the bottom up.
Speakers for this colloqium event are Marina Rustow, Princeton University, author of The Lost Archive: Traces of the Caliphate in a Medieval Synagogue (2020) and Daniel Wakelin, University of Oxford, author of Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England: Making English Literary Manuscripts, 1400–1500 (2022).
Each colloquium brings together two scholars whose recent work engages with similar themes from different cultural and temporal eras. Rather than delivering formal talks, speakers will initiate a dialogue that places their related works in conversation. Participants are encouraged to have read their books in advance and will be invited to attend a casual pre-discussion of these works prior to the colloquium. Hard copy and .pdfs of scholarship will be made available to colloquium participants upon request. Contact Deborah McGrady (dlm4z@virginia.edu) for information.
Aynne Kokas is the C.K. Yen Professor at the Miller Center and an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. Kokas’ research examines Sino-U.S. media and technology relations. Her book Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, October 2022) argues that exploitative Silicon Valley data governance practices help China build infrastructures for global control. Kokas is a non-resident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program.
Speakers for this colloqium event are Lydia Barnett, Northwestern University, author of After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (2022) and Adam Goldwyn, North Dakota State University, author of Byzantine Ecocriticism: Humans, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (2018).
Each colloquium brings together two scholars whose recent work engages with similar themes from different cultural and temporal eras. Rather than delivering formal talks, speakers will initiate a dialogue that places their related works in conversation. Participants are encouraged to have read their books in advance and will be invited to attend a casual pre-discussion of these works prior to the colloquium. Hard copy and .pdfs of scholarship will be made available to colloquium participants upon request. Contact Deborah McGrady (dlm4z@virginia.edu) for information.
In-person only
Dipesh Chakrabarty is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School. His fields of expertise include modern South Asian history and historiography, postcolonial studies, theory and history, globalization, climate change and human history.
Chakrabarty holds a BSc (physics honors) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate Diploma in management (considered equivalent to MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD (history) from the Australian National University. He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Foundation Prize for his contributions to global history and of the 2019 Tagore Memorial Prize awarded by the Government of West Bengal for his book The Crises of Civilization: Exploring on Global and Planetary Histories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).
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