Amitav Ghosh: "Can the Non-human Speak? Other Beings in Myth, Literature and Ethnography"

The idea of the ‘human’ as a unitary species dates back to the founding years of the very structures of modernity that can now be seen to be hurtling towards collapse. As this process intensifies, it may bring about a fundamental reconsideration of modern ideas regarding which entities possess such attributes as agency, speech, reason, and so on. If so, what kinds of narratives and knowledge traditions can we turn to for guidance about what might lie ahead? This talk explores some possibilities.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford, and Alexandria and is the author of numerous prize-winning books of fiction and nonfiction. Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times and have been widely anthologized. Ghosh holds five Lifetime Achievement awards and six honorary doctorates. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors. In 2010, he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and in 2011, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. In 2018, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, was conferred on Ghosh, the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. In 2024, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ghosh received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2026.

Sponsored by the Greenberg Distinguished Scholar Program and the Reed College Environmental Humanities Initiative. Free and open to the public.