Homi Bhabha speaks. Symposium on Cultural Citizenship at Paine Hall, cosponsored with the Silk Road Project. Diana Sorensen, Jacqueline Bhabha, Yo-Yo Ma, Colin Jacobsen, Cristina Pato, Homi Bhabha, and members of the Silk Road Ensemble. Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
Homi Bhabha speaks. Symposium on Cultural Citizenship at Paine Hall, cosponsored with the Silk Road Project. Diana Sorensen, Jacqueline Bhabha, Yo-Yo Ma, Colin Jacobsen, Cristina Pato, Homi Bhabha, and members of the Silk Road Ensemble. Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Diya TV) — Harvard University literary and cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha, a professor of English and director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, has won a Humboldt Research Award for his academic contributions.
The honor, awarded annually by the Germany-based Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, celebrates Bhabha’s entire body of work in humanities and recognizes his “cutting-edge achievements of the future.”
Bhabha will attend the awards ceremony in Germany, where he will deliver a speech on his work and the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. The ceremony will be held at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin.
Bhabha, who holds an honorary degree from Free University of Berlin, has been described by colleagues such as Diana Sorensen, dean of Arts and Humanities and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, as an academic force who has “coined many turns of phrase and concepts that have charted a way of thinking that help to address many of the concepts of our time.”
“There’s practically no essay I will read by a Latin American, French, or American critic that doesn’t engage with Homi’s ideas,” said Sorensen. “He has a way of getting at literary and broader world problems with a conceptual acuity that helps people think through similar problems.”
“He has an idea — perhaps about violence, or the public and the private — and he gets people together to think about it,” she said. “In that sense, he makes the University happen.”
Bhabha has sat on the board for the United Nations Education, Cultural, and Scientific Organization since 2007. For his work on colonized people resisting the power of the colonizer, Bhabha was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2012.
Born in Mumbai, Bhabha graduated with a B.A. from Elphinstone College at the University of Mumbai and an M.A., M.Phil., and D.Phil. in English Literature from Christ Church, Oxford University.
