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Tune in for narratives critical to our times. Listen, ask and seek answers.

Homi K. Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha

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. 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 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 honoured by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London for his influential work in studies of colonialism, postcolonialism and globalisation. 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.

Session

The Governance of the Unprepared:

Homi Bhabha in conversation with Sanjoy Roy

At a time of a global pandemic and a century which has seen turmoil and progress in equal measure, the one feature that stands out is how unprepared the human race is for both man-made and natural calamities. Scholar and critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha speaks to Sanjoy K. Roy about this pandemic of being unprepared and dwells on the future as well as the importance of the common good versus the self.