Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

April - July 2016

“Non-Committal Involvements”: Literary Detectives across South Asia

This project will seek to locate South Asian detective fiction in a locus of literary-cultural engagement with the historical singularities of the second half of the twentieth century. The global South, in general, and South Asia, in particular, have seen a steady and growing interest in the genre. While a critical microhistory of it needs to look at the post/modern human subject as an anomie-ridden, individuated Self, the role of globalised political-ideological discourses in structuring global attitudes to crime and punishment is significant. One seeks to engage with this contested selfhood through a close reading of selected South Asian works.

Gautam Chakrabarti is an Assistant Lecturer in Comparative Literature and "Berlin and German Studies" at the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), where he has been a DRS-HONORS Postdoctoral Fellow (2014-15). He has also finished, at the FUB, his PhD, on “Introducing European Drama in Early Modern India” (2011-14), under Prof. Joachim Küpper (PI, ERC-Project “DramaNet”); the dissertation is currently in preparation as a book manuscript.

He has studied and taught English Literature and Culture Studies in various universities in India, and has also researched and taught in Finland, Russia, Poland and the Baltic States. He was a Visiting Lecturer in a couple of universities and institutes in St Petersburg, Russia (Winter 2008-9). His primary research interests are in comparative literary-cultural history and world literature. Web: http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we03/institut/mitarbeiter/DramaNet/chakrabarti/index.html