Events

 A roundtable discussion with Srinivas Aravamudan, Siraj Ahmed, with Stathis Gourgouris and Gauri Viswanathan as discussants, moderated by Madeleine Dobie

Leading scholars discuss their recent work on Orientalism in 18th and 19th century European literature and philosophy. Responding to Edward Saids seminal theory of Orientalism and to its critics, they consider how the orientalist tradition and its reception have been interwoven with the rise of philology, the formation of disciplines, and the establishment of a literary canon.

Srinivas Aravamudan is Dean of Humanities at Duke University's Trinity College of the Arts and Sciences and author, most recently, of Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel.  Siraj Ahmed is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Lehman College and author of The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India, and of the forthcoming Archaeology of Babel: Colonial Law and Critical Method.

Stathis Gourgouris is Professor, Institute of Comparative Literature & Society and Classics at Columbia. Gauri Viswanathan is the Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia. Madeleine Dobie is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia.