2013 Guest Lectures

Our 2013 guest lecturers included Homi Bhabha, Emily Apter and Gish Jen.


Homi Bhabha, a 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, opened the session with a keynote lecture, "On Living Side by Side: Who Is at Home in Globalization?"


A member of the Institute's Board, Emily Apter is Professor of French  and Comparative Literature at New York University. Apter challenged the question of untranslatability and untranslatables in her talk "Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability" based on her most recent book. The lecture was followed by a panel chaired by Djelal Kadir, during which Lawrence Venuti and Nirvana Tanoukhi responded to the issues raised by Emily Apter's provocative talk, reflecting on how the issue of untranslatability is dealt with in world literary studies.



Chinese American writer Gish Jen gave a lecture drawn from her forthcoming book, "Tiger Writing," based on the 2011 Massey Lectures at Harvard.