The Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations
The Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations is held on a rotating basis by an ICSLAC faculty member entrusted with making a leading contribution to the program. Building on an established record of interdisciplinary research, the Professorship holder creates synergies and engagement around a topic of specific relevance to the Cultural Mediations academic community. The Professorship revolves around the delivery of a special topic seminar enhanced throughout the academic year by a program of events. It is named in honour of Ruth and Mark Phillips, two emeritus ICSLAC faculty members whose lasting contributions helped shape the Cultural Mediations program and the Institute as a whole as a thriving academic environment for interdisciplinary doctoral research.
CURRENT PROFESSORSHIP HOLDER
Dr. Philip Kaisary is the author of The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014) and From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (forthcoming, SUNY Press). His writing has appeared in Atlantic Studies, Law & Humanities, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), and Slavery & Abolition, among other publications. He has received fellowships and grants from organizations including the Fulbright Program and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He is the 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor in Cultural Mediations and an Associate Professor in the Department of Law & Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His current research comprises a critique of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement and a proposal for the field’s reconstruction along more globally inclusive and materialist lines.
PAST PROFESSORSHIP HOLDER
Dr Birgit Hopfener is an art historian of contemporary art and theory in the global context. She is an Associate Professor in the School for the Study of Art and Culture at Carleton University, cross-appointed with the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. Her research and teaching are situated in the field of critical global art history with a regional expertise in Chinese art.
RECENT EVENTS
The annual 2024 Ruth and Mark Philips Professorship lecture was held on Wednesday, March 20, 2024.
For the 2024 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship (RMPP) Lecture, Dr. Philip Kaisary welcomes Dr. Auritro Majumder, University of Houston, for his talk entitled “(Third) World Literature and Decolonization: Humanist Internationalism and Contemporary Literary Studies.” For the poster, see here.
This talk discusses the revolutionary genealogies of the third world (1945-1991), exploring both its earlier antecedents and subsequent legacies. While recent scholarship has focused on the mediations around the idea of world literature, from European colonization to US-led globalization, much less discussed are the concepts that were articulated from, and grounded in the realities of, the peripheries and margins of the Euro-US dominated world. Considerations of literature, and culture more broadly, played an enormous role in the mass mobilizations of 19C and 20C decolonization: there also took place significant rethinking of the issues of textuality, forms, and language, as well as the relations between theory and practice, city and country, society and nature, urban middle classes and rural subaltern groups, to mention only a few. In this radical frame, the overall emphasis was on a “new humanism” — drawing on vital but neglected intellectuals of the third world, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the talk addresses how their humanist work, and vision, speak to the contemporary global situation of the literary humanities.”
Dr. Auritro Majumder is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston and author of Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His current research comprises a book project exploring ideas of the human, “The Global South in Literature and Theory,” and a co-edited anthology, “Cultures of the Cold War in South Asia.”
Majumder has authored over a dozen essays, appearing in academic journals including Critical Asian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Interventions, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Mediations, Research in African Literatures, and South Asian Review.