Faculty
Dickens Leonard
Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies
Ph.D. (University of Hyderabad, India)
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
R–1, Baishnabghata Patuli Township, Kolkata – 700 094, India
Tel : +91 (0)33 2462 7252 / 5794 / 5795 / 2436 8313 / 7794 / 95 / 97
Room Extn. : 221 Fax : +91 (0)33 2462 6183
Email : dleonardm@gmail.com, dleonardm@cssscal.org
Dr. Dickens Leonard researched on the writings of the 19th century Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass and Tamil Buddhism for his PhD (2017) from University of Hyderabad, Telangana, India. He was formerly DAAD-visiting PhD fellow (2016) at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August University, Goettingen, Germany. His interests lie in literary studies, comparative literature, film and cultural studies, translation, and the history of anti-caste thought. He is largely interested in critical humanities, in the intersection of these disciplines, as it paves the way towards a meaningful and transformatory pedagogy for Human Sciences. Besides researching, and recently teaching in this area, his current research explores anti-caste intellectual thought and comparative cultural studies in India. His research publications largely explore how anti-caste intellectuals engaged with religion and literature in the context of colonialism and print in India; and also on contemporary Tamil cinema and culture.
He recently received the Fulbright-Nehru post-doctoral research grant (2019-20), where he wishes to collect and analyze material on, what he calls, “shadow modernity” – the most oppressed communities’ engagement with colonial modernity – which provided opportunities for new employment and made travel conditional. The project would study migration and print with a critical anti-race and caste framework; and it would centralize and compare the Dalit point-of-view with that of the African-American experience. The plan is to look into the archives of 19th and 20th century print that were run by African-Americans, and conceptualize the ethical dimensions of these movements against inherited inequalities and entrenched oppression.