Prasanta Chakravarty

Associate Professor

Telephone: +91-0120-6678598

Email: pchakravarty@english.du.ac.in

Office # 52C Arts Faculty, North Campus

PhD (State University of New York, Buffalo, 2004), MA (Comparative Literature, SUNY, Buffalo, 2001; English, Jadavpur University, 1995), BA (University of Calcutta, 1993).

Biography:

My interest lies in exploring the relationship between art/literature and flowing life. The last three books: Time, Doubt and Wonder in the Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2019), The Opulence of Existence (Three Essays Collective, 2017) and The Creature in Power and Pain (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2021) delve into the questions of doubt and belief, force and vulnerability, form and expression, gestures and rhythm, formations of collectives and their dissipation. Currently, I coordinate an academic collective which seeks to explore the subject of Selfhood and Crisis. I am editing an anthology titled Assured Self, Restive Self: Encounters in Crisis (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2022), a result of the engagements and ruminations of the collective.

A set of my interests revolve around antiquarian studies and early modern culture. I started my career by investigating heterodox political and radical pamphleteering and literature in seventeenth century England in my doctoral work, later published as Like Parchment in the Fire: Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War (Routledge, 2006). Those interests evolved in other directions: the religious underpinnings of Thomas Hobbes, the antinomian potentialities in the writings of John Milton and a survey of the early modern Neo-Platonism. For the past few years I have been particularly invested in revisiting the political and literary writings of Niccolo Machiavelli. With Sukanta Chaudhuri, I am currently editing a book entitled Machiavelli Then and Now: History, Politics, Literature (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).

The overlapping areas of phenomenology, religion and art converge in another set of interests. In this domain, Biblical studies remain an abiding investment. In a separate project, I am working on the relationship between exemplars and community formation in Old Testament narratives.

Contemporary poetry and political philosophy also inform my work. An edited volume on reflections on art and literature was published as Shrapnel Minima: Writings from Humanities Underground (Seagull Books and University of Chicago Press, 2014). An anthology on the contemporary condition of the political appears as Populism and Its Limits: After Articulation (Bloomsbury, 2021).

I have published two anthologies of poetry: Rules of the Game (2014) and Tetherings (2018).

Areas of Interest: Political Philosophy, Early Modern Studies, Literature and Religion, Poetry and Poetics.

Courses Taught:Literature and Political Imagination, Lyric Poetry, Early Modern Culture and Literature, Religion and Literature.