Martin Puchner, Homi K. Bhabha | Jaipur Literature Festival

The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History and Civilisation : Martin Puchner & Homi K. Bhabha

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English at Harvard University. His prize-winning books range from philosophy to the arts and his Norton Anthology of World Literature and his online courses have reached students in 160 countries. His new book, The Written World, tells the story of literature from clay tablets to the Internet.

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the English and Comparative Literature Departments at Harvard University. He was founding director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University from 2011-2019 and director of the Harvard Humanities Center from 2005-2011. From 2008-2019, he held the inaugural position of Senior Adviser on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University and from 2005- 2008 served as Senior Adviser in the Humanities at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. His works include Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004. His next book will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Bhabha has written on contemporary art for Art forum and has written a range of essays on William Kentridge, Anish Kapoor, Taryn Simon, and Mathew Barney, amongst others. He is a member of the Academic Committee for the Shanghai Power Station of Art, advisor on the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives project at the Museum of Modern Art New York, and Curator in Residence of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Bhabha served on jury for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and the 2018 Sharjah Biennial. In 2019, he was honored by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London for his influential work in studies of colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization. With the support of the Volkswagen and Mellon Foundations, Bhabha is leading a research project on the Global Humanities. In 1997 he was profiled by Newsweek as one of “100 Americans for the Next Century.” He holds honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, and the Free University Berlin. In 2012 he was awarded the Government of India’s Padma Bhushan Presidential Award in the field of literature and education and received the Humboldt Research Prize in 2015. In 2018 Bhabha received an honorary doctorate at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History and Civilisation
The story of how literature shaped world history, from Alexander the Great and the Iliad to Don Quixote and Harry Potter and the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival. In this groundbreaking talk, Harvard Literature professor Martin Puchner leads us on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal the powerful role that stories and literature have played in creating the world we have today. Puchner introduces us to numerous visionaries as he explores 16 foundational texts selected from more than 4000 years of world literature and reveals how writing has inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, the spark of philosophical and political ideas and the birth of religious beliefs. Indeed, literature has touched the lives of generations and changed the course of history . Throughout The Written World , Puchner chronicles the inventions, writing technologies, the printing press and the book itself that have shaped religion , politics, commerce, people and history , showing how literature turned our planet into a written world.

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