Forum on the Humanities and the Public World

Homi Bhabha, English, Harvard University
“On Global Memory: Thoughts on the Barbaric Transmission of Culture”

Friday, April 18, 2008
2pm  |  Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Department of English, Harvard University; Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard; and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London. His book, Location of Culture, has recently been reprinted as a Routledge Classic and has been translated into Korean, Spanish, Italian, Slovenian, German, Arabic, and Portuguese. Most recently, he completed the introduction to a new translation of Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth; “Still Life,” an essay on the work of the photographer Michal Safdie; and a catalogue essay on the African artist Georges Adeagbo.

Recently, he delivered the Presidential Lecture at the Freie Universität Berlin, “Globalization and Cultural Identity”, as well as keynotes at &ldbquo;State of the World” forum at the Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon); Scope II: Sites and Sounds-Narrating Heritage, co-sponsored by three Austrian ministries (Vienna); the Goethe-Institut meeting of all directors of its international Goethe Instituts; and for the Volkswagen Foundation “Boundaries: Differences. Passages--Passages: Approaches in the Contested Fields of Inter- and Transcultural Communication” conference (Dresden). Previously, he gave the keynote addresses for the Colloquium on Research and Higher Education organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Beckman Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley and the Presidential Lectures at Stanford University. Profiled in such publications as Newsweek, Chicago magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times, Bhabha has also served as faculty advisor for the World Economic Forum in Davos. He has also appeared on numerous radio broadcasts on the BBC and elsewhere.

Educated at the University of Bombay and the University of Oxford, Bhabha advises key arts institutions which include the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, the Whitney Museum of American Arts in New York, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He also holds honorary visiting professorships at the University of Michigan and Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China. He has published widely in journals including Oxford Literary Review and Screen. He sits on the editorial board of amongst others, October, Critical Inquiry, and New Formations, and is a regular contributor to Artforum. Bhabha is currently at work on A Measure of Dwelling, a theory of vernacular cosmopolitanism forthcoming from Harvard University Press and The Right to Narrate, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Links

Wikipedia Entry
PhilWeb Entry
“Translator Translated” (Interview with W.J.T. Mithchell in Artforum, March 1995)
Harvard Humanities Center, Director's Letter
“Liberalism's Sacred Cow” (Boston Review, Oct/Nov 1997)
Video: “A Global Measure - Writing, Rights, and Responsibilities”(lecture at UC Santa Barbara, 4 Oct 2004)
“Humanities at Harvard”(essay, April 2006)
Video: “Sites & Subjects: Narrating Heritage”(interview at Scope II Conference, Austria, 24 September 2006)