Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, teaches Comparative Literature and the Politics of Culture. She was educated at the University of Calcutta, and came to Cornell University in 1961 to finish doctoral work. Her books are Myself Must I Remake (1974), In Other Worlds (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1988), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), and Death of a Discipline (2003). Other Asias, and An Aesthetic Education: or, Globalizing the Curriculum? are in press. She has translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps (1994), Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999), and Chotti Munda and his Arrow (2002). She has also translated the eighteenth-century Bengali mystic lyricist Ramprashad Sen. She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto and the University of London, as well as many other honors. She is active in the International Women's Movement, the struggle for ecological justice, and rural
literacy. Her influence has been felt in Art and Architecture, Law and Political Science, in curatorial practices here and abroad. Her work has been translated into many languages. Her focus has remained concentrated upon education in the Humanities as the best lasting weapon to combat imperialism.