Professor Mary Louise Pratt will present a lecture, “Planetary Knowledge Making: The Arc of Area Studies,” with responses by Timothy Mitchell and Gauri Viswanathan.

Speaker

Mary Louise Pratt is a Silver Professor and Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. A versatile and creative scholar of Latin American literature and popular cultural production, her theorization of the “contact zone” in the early 1990s was among her many contributions to the broader postcolonial turn in literary studies and anthropology. She is the author of three books: Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, and Planetary Longings, as well as co-editor (with Kathleen Newman) of Critical Passions: Essays of Jean Franco. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987-88, served as the President of the Modern Language Association in 2003, and was an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of 2019.

Respondents

Timothy Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. A political theorist and historian, his areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory.

Gauri Viswanathan is the Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities and former Director of the South Asia Institute (2000-2003; 2017-2020) at Columbia University. She has published widely on education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines.

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