Homi Bhabha, a former member of the Institute’s board and the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to Harvard’s President and Provost, will be delivering the keynote lecture for our 9th IWL session. Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, and cosmopolitanism, among other themes. Some of his works include Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004. Harvard University Press will publish his forthcoming book A Global Measure, and Columbia University Press will publish his next book The Right to Narrate.
A leading proponent of metafiction and hypertext, Robert Coover is a revolutionary in contemporary American literature. A longtime member of the faculty at Brown University, where he founded the Freedom to Write Program in 1989 for endangered writers, Coover has also been active in new media as a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization. His best-known work, The Public Burning (1977), deals with the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Half of the book is devoted to the mythic hero Uncle Sam, dealing with the equally fantastic Phantom, who represents international Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon to find what is really going on amidst the welter of narratives. Coover’s most recent novel is Huck Out West (2018), which envisions life as an adult for one of America’s most famous young heroes.