Biography

Saugata Bhaduri is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has served as Visiting Professor at many universities and colleges in Europe, UK, and the USA, and has been recipient of several international research grants and awards. His areas of research interest include the cultural history of colonial Bengal, literary and cultural theory, popular culture, and translation and comparative literature studies. His latest books are Polycoloniality: European Transactions with Bengal from the 13th to the 19th Century (Bloomsbury 2020) and the forthcoming A Critical History of Bengali Literature (Orient Blackswan). His earlier books include Transcultural Negotiations of Gender: Studies in (Be)Longing (Springer 2015), Literary Theory: An Introductory Reader (Anthem 2010), Perspectives on Comparative Literature and Culture in the Age of Globalization (Anthem 2010), Negotiating Glocalization (Anthem 2008), and Translating Power (Katha 2008).

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Collaboration with the Institute of History of Representations and Ideas in Modernities (IHRIM)

The invitation of Professor Saugata Bhaduri, is part of the cooperation agreement signed in 2013 between the ENS de Lyon and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, where Mr. Bhaduri is stationed, and is triply important for IHRIM.
First, because of the anteriority and the growing fruitfulness of the collaborative relations maintained with the ENS of Lyon and with our laboratory, through Professor Vanessa Guignery. Secondly, because these relations are rooted in a great topicality of research, not only in comparative literature and in a global perspective, but also in all the Humanities which, at the initial impulse of literature, are nowadays largely concerned with the question of the criteria of inclusion and exclusion of the canon. Professor Saugata Bhaduri's candidacy presents a singularity that is of particular interest to IHRIM and the way in which researchers work on this question of norms and canons: that of reflecting on the concept of "polycoloniality" and the toolbox that accompanies it, by also including its critics. This provides a third important justification for her visit: from a multidisciplinary perspective and an openness to the diversity of languages and cultures, and thus an informed and reflexive questioning of sectarian identity politics, Professor Saugata Bhaduri's work and interventions are bound to be of great interest to colleagues and students, and to open up new prospects for collaboration, such as co-supervision of theses.