Auritro Majumder
Associate Professor
- 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 (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 鈥減eripheral internationalism鈥� 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, 鈥淭he Global South in Literature and Theory,鈥� and a co-edited anthology, 鈥淐ultures of the Cold War in South Asia.鈥� 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鈥檚 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.
Essays:
Majumder, Auritro. 2019. 鈥淭he Literary Lumpen: The Naksha Narratives of Binoy Ghosh.鈥� South Asian Review 39 (3-4): 321-334.
Majumder, Auritro. 2018. 鈥淢ikhail Bakhtin: Between Historicism and Postcolonial Critique.鈥� Journal of Multicultural Discourses 13(4): 326-333.
Majumder, Auritro. 2018. 鈥淭oward a Materialist Critique of the Postnational: Haile Gerima鈥檚 Luk谩csian Realism in Harvest 3000 Years.鈥� Research in African Literatures 49 (1): 209-225.
Majumder, Auritro. 2018. 鈥淲orld Literature, the Geist and the East, 1907-1942.鈥� History, Imperialism, Critique: New Essays in World Literature. Ed. Asher Ghaffar (New York: Routledge): 13-28.
Majumder, Auritro. 2017. 鈥淭he Case for Peripheral Aesthetics: Fredric Jameson, the World-System and Cultures of Emancipation.鈥� Interventions 19 (6): 781-796.
Majumder, Auritro. 2017. 鈥淕ayatri Spivak, Planetarity, and the Labor of Imagining Internationalism.鈥� Mediations 30 (2): 15-28.
Majumder, Auritro. 2017. 鈥淐aste, Race, and Intellectual History: Notes on a Singular Modernity.鈥� 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.
Majumder, Auritro. 2016. 鈥淐an Bengali Literature be Postcolonial?鈥� Comparative Literature Studies 53 (2): 417-425.
Majumder, Auritro. 2016. 鈥淣axalites.鈥� The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Eds. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell). 3000 words.
Majumder, Auritro. 2014. 鈥淭he Poetics and Politics of Blackness: Literature as a Site of Transnational Contestation in Chanakya Sen鈥檚 The Morning After and Utpal Dutt鈥檚 The Rights of Man.鈥� Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50 (4): 423-436.
Majumder, Auritro. 2014. 鈥淩epresentations and Re-presentations: Reading Coca-Cola Advertising, and the Visuals of Anti-Coke Struggles in India.鈥� Contentious Connections: Social Imagination in Globalizing South Asia. Eds. Sirpa Tenhunen and Klaus Karttunen (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing): 55-78.
Basu, Subho and Auritro Majumder. 2013. 鈥淒ilemmas of Parliamentary Communism: The Rise and Fall of the Left in West Bengal.鈥� Critical Asian Studies 45 (2): 167-200.
Majumder, Auritro. 2012. 鈥淔rantz Fanon: Revisiting Anticolonialism.鈥� Modern Social Thinkers. Ed. Pradip Basu (Calcutta: Setu): 144-161.
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)