Prof. Homi K. Bhabha
Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior Advisor to the President and Provost, Harvard University, USA
Prof. Bhabha is a leading cultural and literary theorist and the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and various other themes. His seminal work The Location of Culture presents a theory of cultural hybridity to understand the connections between colonialism and globalization. He argues that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent and transgressive. Bhabha also wrote the introduction to a new translation of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and has written on the work of an array of contemporary artists.
Bhabha is a Trustee of the UNESCO World Report on Cultural Diversity, a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Architectural Prize, and has served as Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Human Rights. He serves on the advisory boards of the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Indo-US Commission on Museums and Culture, the German Research Foundation, and the Graduate School of North American Studies and the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Free University Berlin. He has received honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, and Free University Berlin. In 2012 he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in the field of literature and education.