A talk by Kannan Muthukrishnan, scholar of modern Tamil literature at the French Institute of Pondicherry.
Speaker Bio
Kannan Muthukrishnan is a scholar of modern Tamil literature at the French Institute of Pondicherry. His research interests include contemporary Tamil language, literature and history and Dalit literature and politics.
Since 1991, Kannan Muthukrishnan has been leading the research program on contemporary Tamil culture, establishing a collection of sources comprising journals and books in the library of the IFP (French Institute of Pondicherry). This research program functions as a bridge linking the isolated fields of classical Tamil and contemporary Tamil.
The studies, conferences, collections and publications taken up by this program aim to build a Centre for Contemporary Tamil at the IFP.
In the framework of this program, Kannan Muthukrishnan has supervised more than 30 doctoral students from India and abroad. He has been on regular lecture-research visits to Belgium, France, and the USA in several universities (University of Namur, Paris III, Sorbonne, INALCO, UC Berkeley, Rutgers University, Princeton, Harvard, etc.). He is an active and founding member of the Historical Atlas program at the IFP.
In trying to write a cultural history of contemporary Tamil in India, one is inevitably led to raising the question of sources. There are sources In India, but there is no access or path to them there is serious lack of archive fever (either oral, written, or visual) among the people. Our research at the IFP looks into this lacuna in Indian culture and explores the following question: What constitutes an archive in India? The current research entails a return from the sources at hand to the construction of an archive. What kind of process will enable it? How do we make an archive alive in the present context?
Read more about Kannan M. HERE
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PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.
The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
