The “migrant” is often understood through the lenses of the global and the geo-political; “ecologies”, by contrast, are usually understood through the lenses of the planetary and the environmental. But how separate are these supposedly distinct spheres?
In a time haunted by unprecedented crises of human displacement and climate change, how might we rethink both what it means to be a “migrant” and what the “ecologies” of migration are?
Speakers:
Prof Sumana Roy (Ashoka University) will talk about “The Bodhi Tree: Soil, Soil, Scandal”.
Sumana Roy is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. She is also working on the Indian Plant Humanities project with the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability, Ashoka University. Prior to this, she taught English Literature in government colleges in Bengal. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich (2018), and a Full Time Visiting Fellow at the South Asia Program, Cornell University (Fall 2018).
Prof Jonathan Gil Harris (Ashoka University) will talk about “Fog and Filthy Air”
Jonathan Gil Harris is Professor of English at Ashoka University. He earned his Bachelors and Masters from Auckland University, and completed his DPhil from University of Sussex. Prior to coming to Ashoka, he was a Professor at George Washington University, where he taught since 2003. He has also held positions at Ithaca College, New York, and University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Prof Martin Crowley (University of Cambridge) will talk about “Undergrowth”
Martin Crowley is Professor of Modern French Thought and Culture at the University of Cambridge. He studied French and German at the University of Oxford, before pursuing an MA in Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, and working for two years for the French publisher Larousse, as a bilingual dictionary editor. He then returned to Oxford, where he completed a DPhil in French, on the author and film-maker Marguerite Duras. After four years as Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Manchester, he came to Cambridge in 2000. He has been a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, and serves as general Editor of the journal French Studies.
Prof Subha Mukherji (University of Cambridge) will be talking about “Migrant Forms”
Subha Mukherji is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. She was educated in Kolkata, Oxford and Cambridge. Since her influential book on Renaissance law and drama, and her edited volumes on tragicomedy, the poetics of thresholds, and fictions of knowledge, her research interests have converged on directing a major 5-year interdisciplinary research project funded by a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council: Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature – a radical revisioning of early modern knowledge. Subha is also a member of the Management Committee and Working Group of the Cost Action project People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean, or PIMo, based in Florence.
