Dilip Gaonkar
A professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University, where he directs the Center for Global Culture and Communication, Gaonkar investigates globalisation and modernity as a cultural phenomenon. He is also the director of the Center for Transcultural Studies, an international and interdisciplinary research network that focuses on the social, political, and cultural transformations of today’s world. His fields of interest include rhetoric and the analysis of discourse in the public sphere, on the one hand, and the multiple modernities emerging in the global world, on the other. He has edited Globalizing American Studies (with Brian Edwards, University of Chicago Press, 2010), Alternative Modernities (Duke University Press, 2001) and Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (with Cary Nelson, Routledge, 1996) with intellectuals such as Charles Taylor, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Arjun Appadurai. He has been the editor of the cultural studies magazine Public Culture and has written several essays and studies on rhetoric, globalization, democracy, and the media. Selected titles include “Laclau’s On Populist Reason” (with Robert Hariman, Cultural Studies, 2012), “Cultures of Democracy” (Public Culture, 2007) and “Commitments in a Post-Foundational World” (with Keith Topper, The Hedgehog Review, 2005). In 2017, he was awarded the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in recognition of his research on anti-democratic and populist thought in the West, based an intellectual perspective from the Global South.
Update: 19 December 2023