Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Diretor of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University

Homi K. Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha has been the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University since 2001. He graduated in English Literature in the Oxford University. After lecturing at the University of Sussex for more than ten years, Bhabha received a senior fellowship at Princeton University and was visiting professor also in Pennsylvania, Chicago and in London University College. He has received honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, and Free University Berlin. His interests include cosmopolitanism and human rights in the context of Aesthetics and Culture, diasporic artists, cultural change and power, security and globalization. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has coined a number of the field’s neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, third space and ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised peoples have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha’s theory. His seminal work The Location of Culture presents a theory of cultural hybridity to understand the connections between colonialism and globalization. He defends that cultural production is always most productive where it is more ambivalent and transgressive. He sits on the editorial board of Public Culture, a journal published by Duke University Press. Bhabha is a Trustee of the UNESCO World Report on Cultural Diversity. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education by the Government of India in 2012.