Gayatri CHAKRAVORTY Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University, New York. B.A.University of Calcutta (1959); M.A. (1962) & Ph.D (1967), Cornell University. She has also taught at Brown, Texas-Austin, UC-Santa Cruz, Université Paul Valéry, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Stanford, University of British Columbia, Goethe Universitäät in Frankfurt, Riyadh University, Emory, and the University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong). 

Before coming to Columbia in 1991, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan, the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (Calcutta), the Davis Center for Historical Studies (Princeton), the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio). She has been a Kent Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. Among her many Distinguished Faculty Fellowships is the Tagore Fellowship at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (India). She has been a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.

Among her publications are Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida's De la grammmatologie), Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women, Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translations with critical material of the fiction of Mahasweta Devi), In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, Outside in the Teaching Machine, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Death of a Discipline, and Other Asias. Among her regular interventions in the field of Art are yearly seminars with the Independent Study program at the downtown Whitney. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. She also publishes and lectures in her native Bengali. Among her numerous current projects is "Radiating Globality," a project involving the Sennegambia region of Africa, China, India, the U.S., and five European countries. 

She is the recipient of the Translation Prize (1997) from the Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Literature) in India. In June 2000, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Toronto. Professor Spivak has been elected to the Advisory Board of the English Institute, to the Executive Board of the International Center for Writing and Translation, to the Analytical Circle of the newly established British think tank Zamyn, and to a Senior Fellowship at the School of Criticism and Theory. In Spring 2001, she was the first Y. K. Pao Distinguished Visiting Professor in Cultural Studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In Spring 2003, she occupied the Citizen's Chair at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. From 2002 to 2004, she was the Hitesranjan Sanyal Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, India. In March 2003, the Latin American Studies Association honored Professor Spivak as a scholar who has "decisively influenced scholarship of issues of globalization and neocolonialism in relation to Latin American history, politics, and culture." In July 2003, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of London, and in 2008 from Oberlin College; in 2011 she was awarded another honorary doctorate from Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. She was Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia from 2003-2009. In June 2012, she was awarded the Kyoto Prize for arts and philosophy.