Ananya Jahanara Kabir
Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature, the Department of English at King’s College London. She was the winner of the Infosys Prize for the Humanities in 2018, and the Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander van Humboldt Foundation, Germany, in 2019. She currently works on creolisation as a historical process and cultural theory, and its applicability to India.
In May 2020, she co-founded the multi-lingual online cultural platform, le thinnai kreyol, together with writer Ari Gautier. The platform promotes their shared vision for a plural and creolised India. Ari and Ananya research the historical basis for this vision in the transoceanic relationships that emerged through the mercantile and colonising ventures of Europeans and the mutual impact of these and anterior commercial and transcultural circulations, particularly in the Indian Ocean world. Taking inspiration from creolisation itself, they devise collaborative methodologies for the non-hierarchical dissemination of knowledge within and beyond academic audiences. Their project has been written about in print and online media, and they have been invited to present it to academic and popular audiences worldwide.
She is a speaker and organiser of a series of events for Atelier KITLV, a collaboration between Framer Framed and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV).
