Gayatri Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She received her B.A. at the University of Calcutta (1959); her M.A. (1962) and Ph.D (1967) from Cornell University. Professor Spivak has also taught at Brown, Texas at Austin, UC Santa Cruz, Universite Paul Valery, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Stanford, University of British Columbia, Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt, Riydah University, and Emory. Before coming to Columbia in 1991, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan, the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University, the Center for the Study of Social Sciences (Calcutta), the Davis Center for Historical Studies (Princeton), the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio). She has been a Kent fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. Among her Distinguished Faculty Fellowships is the Tagore Fellowship at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (India). She has been a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.

Among her many invited lectures may be mentioned the 1992 Davie Memorial Lecture at Cape Town. She is on the editorial Board of many journals, among them Cultural Critique, boundary 2. New Formations, Diaspora, ARIEL, Re-thinking Marxism, Public Culture, Parallax, Interventions. Professor Spivak is active in rural literacy teacher training on the grassroots level in Aboriginal India and Bangladesh. Among her publications are Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida's De la grammmatologie), Imaginary Maps and Breast Stories (translations with critical material of the fiction Mahasweta Devi), In other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, and Outside in the Teaching Machine.

Among her regular interventions in the field of Art are yearly seminars with the Independent Study program at the downtown Whitney. In 1996-7, Professor Spivak has delivered keynote addresses, at the Linguidticulture Conference at The University of Osaka, at the steirische Herbst in Graz (Austria), at the Lancaster University (UK) Conference on Transformation through Feminism, at documenta X (Germany), at the Johannesburg and Kwangju (Korea) biennales. In December 1997 she delivered the inaugural Mary Levin Goldschmidt-Bollag Memorial lecture in the projected series on Fluchtlings-und-Migrationspolitik in Zurich.

Gayatri Spivak page on the Emory University Postcolonial Studies website.

Passages from "Reading the World: Literary Studies in the Eighties" (1985), In Other Worlds (1987) on the Voice of the Shuttle Humanities Research website at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

"Gayatri Spivak: An Introduction" on the Political Discourse: Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism website at Brown University.