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Auritro Majumder

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Associate Professor

Majumder

  • Phone: (713) 743-5875
  • Email: amajumder@uh.edu
  • Office Hours: Please email for appointments

Professor Auritro Majumder is a literary scholar, critical theorist, and intellectual historian. He is Associate Professor of English with a courtesy appointment in the India Studies Program. His first book is Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Insurgent Imaginations advances a redefinition of contemporary world literature focused on the non-West. Through a sweeping yet grounded study of fiction and drama, cinema, and cultural theory in Bengali, English, and several other languages, the book charts a history of “peripheral internationalism” across India, the erstwhile Soviet Union, China, Latin America, and the United States.

Current works in progress include a second monograph exploring ideas of the human, “The Global South in Literature and Theory,” and a co-edited anthology, “Cultures of the Cold War in South Asia.” Additionally, Majumder has authored over a dozen essays, appearing in academic journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Interventions, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Mediations, Research in African Literatures, and South Asian Review, as well as edited collections and encyclopedias. 

Prof. Majumder has lectured widely to audiences in North and South America, Europe, and South Asia. Presently, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association’s South Asian and South Asian Diasporic Language, Literature and Culture (LLC) Forum, and on the editorial board of the journal, Mediations.

 

Areas of Supervision:

Enquiries in the following fields/areas/languages are welcome: Literary and Critical Theory; Intellectual History; Nineteenth and Twentieth Century World Literature; Decolonization, Race, and Caste; South Asian vernaculars, especially Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu; Latin American Spanish and Portugese; Global Cinemas

 

Education: 

Ph.D. in English, Syracuse, 2014
Certificate in Critical Theory, Cornell, 2012
M.A. (First Class) in English, Jadavpur, 2009
B.A. (First Class Honours) in English, Jadavpur, 2007


Professional Service:

Editorial Board, Mediations
Executive Committee, Modern Language Association South Asia LLC Forum
Jurist, National Endowment for the Humanities
Reviewer for multiple international journals, university presses, fellowships

 

Selected International Talks:

University of Campinas, Brazil, 2020
University of Warwick, United Kingdom, 2019
University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2019
Sorbonne University, France, 2018
Asian Development Research Institute, India, 2018
McGill University, Canada, 2016 

 

Selected Publications:

Books:

Majumder, Auritro. 2020. Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery. New York: Cambridge University Press. Link

Essays:

Majumder, Auritro. 2019. “The Literary Lumpen: The Naksha Narratives of Binoy Ghosh.” South Asian Review 39 (3-4): 321-334. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2018. “Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Historicism and Postcolonial Critique.” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 13(4): 326-333. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2018. “Toward a Materialist Critique of the Postnational: Haile Gerima’s Lukácsian Realism in Harvest 3000 Years.” Research in African Literatures 49 (1): 209-225. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2018. “World Literature, the Geist and the East, 1907-1942.” History, Imperialism, Critique: New Essays in World Literature. Ed. Asher Ghaffar (New York: Routledge): 13-28. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2017. “The Case for Peripheral Aesthetics: Fredric Jameson, the World-System and Cultures of Emancipation.” Interventions 19 (6): 781-796. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2017. “Gayatri Spivak, Planetarity, and the Labor of Imagining Internationalism.” Mediations 30 (2): 15-28. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2017. “Caste, Race, and Intellectual History: Notes on a Singular Modernity.” Crossing Borders: Essays on Literature, Culture and Society in Honor of Amritjit Singh. Eds. Tapan Basu and Tasneem Shahnaaz (Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; New Delhi: Orient Blackswan): 135-146. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2016. “Can Bengali Literature be Postcolonial?” Comparative Literature Studies 53 (2): 417-425. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2016. “Naxalites.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Eds. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell). 3000 words. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2014. “The Poetics and Politics of Blackness: Literature as a Site of Transnational Contestation in Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After and Utpal Dutt’s The Rights of Man.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50 (4): 423-436. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2014. “Representations and Re-presentations: Reading Coca-Cola Advertising, and the Visuals of Anti-Coke Struggles in India.” Contentious Connections: Social Imagination in Globalizing South Asia. Eds. Sirpa Tenhunen and Klaus Karttunen (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing): 55-78. Link

Basu, Subho and Auritro Majumder. 2013. “Dilemmas of Parliamentary Communism: The Rise and Fall of the Left in West Bengal.” Critical Asian Studies 45 (2): 167-200. Link

Majumder, Auritro. 2012. “Frantz Fanon: Revisiting Anticolonialism.” Modern Social Thinkers. Ed. Pradip Basu (Calcutta: Setu): 144-161. Link

 

Research Grants and Awards at Houston:

Project Completion Grant, CLASS, 2019
William Lee Pryor College Professorship, 2018-2019
Research Progress Grant, 2017
CLASS Research Funds, 2016
New Faculty Summer Research Grant, 2015

 

Courses Taught at Houston:

ENGL 3301 Introduction to Literary Studies
ENGL 3322 The Contemporary Novel
ENGL 3365 Postcolonial Literature* Cross-listed with the India Studies Program
ENGL 3380 Modern Indian Literature* Cross-listed with the India Studies Program
ENGL 4396 The City in Cultural Forms (Senior Experience)
ENGL 7315 Postcolonial Dialectics (Graduate)
ENGL 7369 Introduction to Postcolonial Studies (Graduate)
ENGL 8386 Postcolonial Narrations (Graduate)