简介

With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies. Much of her scholarly work interrogates the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. While publishing essays on literary, cinematic, and visual culture in several collections and journals such as boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen, in her first two books, Ghosh focused on contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalization. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed the dialectical relations between emerging global markets and literatures reflexively marked as “postcolonial,” and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) turned to visual popular culture as it constitutes the global. Research is underway for a third monograph, The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization that tracks the relations between globalization and cinematic/post-cinematic images. Apart from these works that directly address the question of the “global” in contemporary mediascapes, in the last three years, Ghosh has turned to risk and globalization—or, rather, how the risk media globalize technoscientific rationality. The shift began in 2008-9 with the research collaboration, “Speculative Globalities” that met at the UCHRI (The University of California Humanities Research Institute). Drawing on this seed project, a group of faculty at University of California, Santa Barbara, convened a series of conferences, screenings, readings, and discussion groups in 2010-2012. In turn these ventures have led to several collaborative projects: a 100-page collective manifesto published under an anonymous participatory author); a co-edited collection of essays, Speculative Globalities; and short book on risk media (co-written with Bhaskar Sarkar). For her part in these collaborations, Ghosh interrogates pandemic media across localized contexts, since risk instruments, programs, and institutions are increasingly modular and scalable to global outcomes. Asking how cultural theory at present can respond to highly scienticized forms of risk that are foundational to a managerial globalization, Ghosh returns to the rich archives of “symbiotic living” of high crisis” contexts surfacing at different historical conjunctures the United States, South Africa, and India. The result is a comparative study of pandemic media on the virus, titled The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics, undertaken on her residency at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, 2012-13 (with its annual theme Risk@Humanities (link sends e-mail)).