Avishek Ganguly

Avishek Ganguly is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of translation, theater and performance, cultural studies, and contemporary literatures in English. His publications include Living Translation: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Seagull Books, 2022), co-edited with Emily Apter, Mauro Pala and Surya Parekh, and Performance and Translation in a Global Age (Cambridge University Press, 2023), co-edited with Kélina Gotman. He is currently working on a monograph on the cultural politics of “Global Englishes” and experimenting with a project at the interface of design and the humanities. 

Ganguly has held visiting research fellowships at Freie Universität Berlin and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and taught at Columbia University, Bryant University and the University of Delhi. At RISD, he held the inaugural Global Faculty Fellowship and was awarded the Robert Turner Theatrical and Performance Design Grant most recently to teach a collaborative, immersive seminar-studio with Christopher Roberts titled Power, Pastness and Performances of Monumentality.

In 2020 Ganguly received the prestigious John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also recently co-taught a year-long faculty seminar titled Decolonizing the Imagination with Paula Gaetano-Adi at RISD. The seminar now lives online as a public syllabus at decolonizingtheimagination.com.

Ganguly believes that the interdisciplinary humanities should play a prominent role in shaping public life and policy conversations around contemporary social issues, and he continues to work with various cultural and nonprofit organizations in the area including the Wilbury Theatre Group and FringePVD: The Providence Fringe Festival. He was recently appointed to serve a three-year term as a commissioner on the Art in City Life Commission in Providence, RI.