Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

University Professor, Columbia Unversity

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor and Founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. 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), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2008), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), and Readings (2014). 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 received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Toronto, London, Rovira I Virgili, Rabindra Bharati, San Martín, St. Andrews, Vincennes à Saint-Denis, Yale, Ghana-Legon, Presidency University, and Oberlin College. She won the Kyoto Prize (2012), and the Padma Bhushan (2013). She is active in the International Women's Movement, the struggle for ecological justice, and rural education. Her influence has been felt in art and architecture, law and political science, in curatorial practices. She works for humanities education as the best lasting weapon to combat contemporary disaster.

Working Group Affiliation

The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories, Project Director