Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, where she teaches Literature and the Politics of Culture. She also teaches Critical Theory at the University of California – Irvine.
Spivak is one of the most distinguished and influential scholars in fields as diverse as postcolonial studies, Third World feminism, continental feminist theory, Marxist theory, subaltern studies, development studies, globalization theory, Latin American Studies, Ethics and Public Policy, curating practices, law, architecture, and the philosophy of alterity here and abroad.
Her considerable published work consistently displays the kind of interdisciplinarity that resonates with scholars in a number of disciplines. Her work is read and discussed by scholars in history, feminism, political economy, philosophy, (Third World) development, translation, and literary theory and analysis.
As the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Spivak is closely associated with the arrival of deconstruction and post-structuralist analysis in the Anglo-American academy.
Cutting edge in its stylistic features and analytical sophistication, her work is equally marked by a critical intelligence that refuses to accept unquestioningly any of the “sacred cows” of post colonial theories, feminism (Third World or continental), or Marxism.
Nor are Spivak’s contributions restricted to academic fields. Apart from her finely honed pedagogy for social transformation, over the past two decades she has been active in teacher training on the grassroots level in aboriginal and Dalit West Bengal, and Bangladesh, funding as well as organizing training for local activists. She is also active in the international women's movement, the struggle for ecological justice. Spivak sees education in the Humanities as the best lasting weapon to combat imperialism at every level.
Among her numerous books, which have been widely translated, are Myself Must I Remake, In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, Outside in the Teaching Machine, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Death of a Discipline, and Other Asias. An Aesthetic Education: or, Globalizing the Curriculum? is in press. She has translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women, and Chotti Munda and His Arrow. She is currently engaged in translating Aimé Césaire, Une Saison au Congo, and Derrida’s Cartouche.
Spivak received her BA at the University of Calcutta and her MA and PhD from Cornell University. Before coming to Columbia in 1991, she was the first Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Spivak has also taught at Brown, Texas at Austin, UC Santa Cruz, Université Paul Valéry, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Stanford, University of British Columbia, Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt, Riyadh University, and Emory.
Formerly the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, she has been a Kent Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow as well as a fellow of the National Humanities Institute, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan, the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University, the Center for the Study of Social Sciences (Calcutta), the Davis Center for Historical Studies (Princeton), and the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio), and a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. Among her distinguished faculty fellowships is the Tagore Fellowship at India’s Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. She has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Toronto and London University.
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