Aparna Dharwadker

Talk Title: Indian Modernisms in a Global Frame: Language, Theory, Practice

October 8, 2026, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CT
In-person: 206 Ingraham Hall
Register for Zoom attendance here.

Presentation Description: Until the 1990s, modernism was considered mainly a Euro-American movement with distinctive literary features that was at its peak during the 1910-1940 period, and was displaced by postmodernism after the end of the second World War. However, in recent decades the “global turn” in the new modernist studies has led to a fundamental reconfiguration of the spatiotemporal boundaries, chronologies, and hierarchical relations of modernism, bringing non-Western and postcolonial regions into its ambit for the first time. In this talk, Professor Dharwadker draws on her recent book, Cosmo-Modernism and Theater in India: Writing and Staging Multilingual Modernisms (Columbia University Press, 2025), which was selected for the 2026 Book Award from the Modernist Studies Association, to discuss why Indian-language modernisms in literature and theatre still appear on the margins of the new modernist studies, and how the theory and practice of this vital post-independence movement can be successfully retrieved. 

About the Speaker
Aparna Dharwadker is Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with expertise in postcolonial studies, modern and contemporary Indian theatre, contemporary world theatre, comparative theatre theory, and South Asian diasporic cultural forms. A widely published scholar in these fields, she is also the only two-time winner of the Joe A. Callaway prize, awarded biannually to the best book in theatre studies—for A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the Present in 2020, and for Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 in 2006. Professor Dharwadker has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the International Research Centre, Freie Universität, Berlin, the Newberry Library, and the Folger Library, among others. Cosmo-Modernism and Theater in India was a finalist for the 2026 Outstanding Book Award of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).