On Climate Change & Disaster Movies

Connelly Lecture: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9, Rosenfield Center Room 101

Srinivas Aravamudan is a distinguished scholar of 18th-century English literature with wide-ranging interests and an unusual approach to contemporary issues.

On Oct. 9, Aravamudan is presenting this year’s Connelly Lecture, “On Climate Change and Contemporary Disaster Movies.”

“Aravamudan's eminence is not restricted only to English studies.,” says Shuchi Kapila, professor of English.  “This is clear in his choice of topic for the Connelly Lecture. In talking about climate change, he brings together his interest in ethics, philosophy, literature, film, and conceptions of the human in our 'Anthropocene' age.”

During his visit, Aravamudan also is discussing "East-West Fiction as World Literature: Reconfiguring Hayy ibn Yaqzan" with English majors and visiting Kapila’s Introduction to Post-Colonial Literature class.

The Connelly Lecture is free and open to the public. The series is named for Peter Connelly, a popular English professor who passed away in 2000.

About Srinivas Aravamudan

Aravamudan was a professor of English and dean of the humanities at Duke University, and has served as president of the CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes). He earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University and has taught at the University of Utah and the University of Washington. He joined the Duke English department in 2000.

Aravamudan specializes in 18th century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory.

He is the author of essays in diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Anthropological Forum, South Atlantic Quarterly and other venues. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 won the outstanding first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. He has also edited Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period: Volume VI Fiction. His book Guru English: South Asian Religion in A Cosmopolitan Language was published by Princeton University Press in January 2006, and republished by Penguin India in 2007. The University of Chicago Press recently published his book-length study on the 18th-century French and British oriental tale, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel; and he has another on sovereignty and anachronism forthcoming. His edition of William Earle's antislavery romance, entitled Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack appeared in 2005 with Broadview Press.

His specialties include British literature, 18th-century literature, postcolonial literature, critical theory, modern to contemporary, and novels. His research summary includes British literature, critical theory, and postcolonial literature.