Duke University - Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Srinivas Aravamudan
Dean of the Humanities

Srinivas Aravamudan received his Ph.D from Cornell University and has taught at the University of Utah and the University of Washington. After joining Duke's English Department in 2000, he became director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. In 2002-2003, Aravamudan was co-convener of the Franklin Humanities Institute seminar Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory.

Aravamudan specializes in eighteenth-century British and French literature and postcolonial literature and theory. He is the author of essays in Diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Anthropological Forum, South Atlantic Quarterly and other venues. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999, Duke University Press) won the outstanding first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. He has also edited Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period: Volume VI Fiction (1999, Pickering and Chatto). His book, Guru English: South Asian Religion in A Cosmopolitan Language (2006, Princeton University Press) was republished by Penguin India in 2007.  His edition of William Earle's antislavery romance, entitled Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, appeared in 2005 with Broadview Press.

He has recently published a book-length study of the eighteenth-century French and British Oriental tale, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (2012, University of Chicago Press), and he is currently working on a book-length study on sovereignty and anachronism.

Affiliated Organizations

• Documentary Studies, Center for

• Duke Islamic Studies Center

• French and Francophone Studies, Center for

• Jewish Studies, Center for

• Late Ancient Studies, Center for

• Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Center for

• Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Center for