The Maya Mitra Das Annual Lecture on Tagore brings a distinguished scholar to campus each year to give a lecture on Tagore.
Spring 2025
The 4th Maya Mitra Das Lecture on Tagore will be delivered by Dr. Hans Harder, Professor of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures, Heidelberg University. Hans Harder is Professor of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests include modern literatures in South Asia, particularly Bengali, religious movements, and colonial and postcolonial intellectual history. More details coming soon.
2024
The 3rd Maya Mitra Das Lecture on Tagore, The Primacy of Creativity in Rabindranath Tagore, will be delivered by Bashabi Fraser, the Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies at Edinburgh Napier University, on Thu, Apr 4 from 5-6:30 pm at the Institute for South Asia Studies. Please click on this link for further details on how to attend the lecture.
2023
The 2nd Maya Mitra Das Lecture on Tagore, The Artistic Truth of Politics: Reading Rabindranath's Fictional Writings, was delivered by scholar of South Asian politics and intellectual history, Prof. Sudipta Kaviraj on Thu, Oct 19 from 9-10:30 am on Zoom. Please click on this link to view the Facebook livestream of the lecture.
Sudipta Kaviraj is a specialist in intellectual history and Indian politics. He works on two fields of intellectual history: Indian social and political thought in the nineteenthand twentiethcenturies, and modern Indian literature and cultural production. His other fields of interest and research include the historical sociology of the Indian state, and some aspects of Western social theory. He received his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Prior to joining Columbia University, he taught at the Department of Political Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has also taught Political Science at JNU, and was an Agatha Harrison Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
Kaviraj’s books include The Imaginary Institution of India (2010) Civil Society: History and Possibilities co-edited with Sunil Khilnani (2001), Politics in India (edited) (1999), and The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (1995).
2022
The Inaugural Maya Mitra Das Lecture on Tagore
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | Starting at the End: Picking Up the Relay of Shesher Kabita: The Inaugural Maya Mitra Das Lecture on Tagore