We invite you to our September lecture by Arjun Appadurai, Postcolonialism, Imperialism and the Global Turn to the Right, which is part of the monthly guest lecture series of the Transregional Dialogues fellowship program at NSSR. 

The lecture will compare the very different cases of Putin's Russia, Erdogan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary and Modi's India to show how fantasies of imperial glory are used to justify the dismantling of democracy, as well as ethnonationalist projects in each of these cases.

Arjun Appadurai is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany). He is also Professor (Emeritus) in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He also holds honorary appointments at Humboldt University (Berlin) and Erasmus University (Rotterdam). He was previously Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also held a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences. Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School from 2004-2006. He was formerly the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center on Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in Mumbai (India).

Professor Appadurai was born and educated in Bombay. He graduated from St. Xavier’s High School and took his Intermediate Arts degree from Elphinstone College before coming to the United States. He earned his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1970, and his M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1976) from The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

During his academic career, he has also held professorial chairs at Yale University, The New School, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, and has held visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Delhi, the University of Michigan, the University of Amsterdam, Erasmus University Columbia University and Oxford University. 

He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke 2006), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minnesota 1996; Oxford India 1997) and The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Verso 2013), and Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age f Derivative Finance (Chicago, 2016). His most recent book, co-authored with Neta Alexander, is Failure (Polity Press 2019)). His books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Italian, Turkish and Arabic.

Arjun Appadurai has held many fellowships and scholarships and has received several scholarly honors, including residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto (California) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and an Individual Research Fellowship from the Open Society Institute (New York). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

Please see our Guest Lecture program for the Fall 2022 here.

Registered attendees will receive the zoom link via email.