Debjani Ganguly

Biography

Debjani Ganguly is Professor of Literature at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU Melbourne, and Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. Her research specialties include modern and contemporary literatures in English; world literature; history and theory of the novel; postcolonial studies; literature and technology; and planetary humanities.  She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005), and the editor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021). Her latest monograph, Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism, is in press with Cambridge University Press. She is the general editor with Francesca Orsini of the monograph series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature. Debjani is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

As Director of humanities institutes at the University of Virginia (2016-2023) and the Australian National University (2007-2014), Debjani has fostered international projects in the fields of pre-modern global cultures, world literature, environmental humanities, oceanic studies, digital humanities, informatics, big data, and AI. She has won research grants worth millions of dollars from the ARC, the Mellon Foundation, and other international funding bodies. Over the course of two decades, she has served on executive councils, advisory boards, review committees and fellowship committees of several institutions such as the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the Modern Languages Association, the International Comparative Literature Association, the Trinity Long Room Hub (Dublin), the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (Bologna), the American Academy of Berlin, Society for the Humanities (Cornell), and the Cogut Humanities Institute (Brown).