Writing on Du Bois: A Work in Progress

University Professor Gayatri Sprivak presents a lecture in the CRPS series on “Writing on Du Bois: A Work in Progress.”

Breaking rules of the academy and trespassing disciplinary boundaries have been central to the intellectual projects of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading literary theorists and cultural critics of our times. Professor Spivak was born in India and received a B.A. at the University of Calcutta. She came to the United States in 1961 and in 1967 she graduated with a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh till 1991, and is currently a University at Columbia University. In addition she has taught at Université Paul Valéry, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, University of British Columbia, Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Riyadh University, and Stanford University among others. Professor Spivak is a scholar of deconstructive approaches to verbal, visual and social texts. By translating Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie into English (published as Of Grammatology, with a critical introduction) she initiated a debate on deconstruction in the Anglo-American academy, and her article “Can the Subaltern Speak” similarly sparked Postcolonial Studies.