Iser bio & publications

Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities
Director, Center for Comparative Literature and Society
Columbia University
Professor, Comparative Literature
UC Irvine
spivakg@uci.edu

Professor Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society. She is also Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Executive Board member of the International Center for Writing and Translation at UCI. Professor Spivak has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Stanford, the University of British Columbia, Emory, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong. Her distinguished faculty, fellow and member appointments include the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Institute and the Subaltern Studies Collective. She received her B.A. English (Honors) at Presidency College, Calcutta (1959) and her PhD in Comparative Literature at Cornell University (1967). Her areas of research include feminism, Marxism, deconstruction and globalization.

Professor Spivak's publications include Of Grammatology (John Hopkins University Press,1976; 1997), a translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), Selected Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Imaginary Maps (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1994), The Spivak Reader (1995), Breast Stories (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi,(1997), Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1999), Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi Goetschel, 1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000), Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, (2002), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), Red Thread (forthcoming). Her major articles include "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" (1985), "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985), "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), "The Politics of Translation" (1992), "Moving Devi" (1999), "Righting Wrongs" (2003), "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching" (2004), and "Translating into English" (2005).

In 2000, Professor Spivak presented the annual Wellek Library Lecture entitled "The New Comparative Literature". Her lecture series is collected in Death of a Discipline (Columbia UP, 2003). Select the following link to view Professor Spivak's Wellek Lecture bibliography.