11/05/2026
Saikat Majumdar, a novelist and a critic, is currently a Faculty Fellow at Transilvania University. He is the author of five novels, two works of general nonfiction on higher education, and two works of literary criticism, most recently, The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony, named one of the Best Scholarly Books of 2024 by The Chronicle of Higher Education. He has taught at universities in the US and Canada, has been a Fellow at Wellesley College, the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, and the Institute of Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest. He is currently Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University.
This talk draws from a book-in-progress, The Critic as Artist: An Autoethnography of World Literature (forthcoming, 2027), which reads the mutual convergence of intellectual analysis and imaginative creation through the sensibility of what is sometimes called creative criticism. While acknowledging canonical western practices in this field, such as by the English and the German Romantic poets and philosophers, it seeks to shift the primary focus of such creative criticism to embattled and marginal identities in the global south and its diaspora. In the work of a group of writers and thinkers with roots in Africa and Asia, criticism becomes a literary and activist practice that enables the deep entanglement of self and archive, subject and history, individual and community.