B. Venkat Mani

Candidate statement

B. Venkat Mani (PhD, Stanford University, 2001) is Professor of German and World Literature and past director of the Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on two connected approaches to Migration Studies. The first comprises investigations of literatures of migrants and minorities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second constitutes construction of world literature through the concept of Bibliomigrancy. Representative of these two lines of inquiry are his monographs Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham UP, 2017; winner of GSA DAAD Prize and MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies) and more recently, as co-editor, A Companion to World Literature (Wiley Blackwell 2020). Mani has received fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council for a Public Humanities Project for Wisconsin Public Radio on “Inside Islam, Dialogue and Debates”; the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Grant for “Bibliomigrancy: World Literature in the Public Sphere,” Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Experienced Researcher Fellowship for Recoding World Literature. He is also part of UW-Madison’s “Just Futures” project on Humanities Education for Anti-Racist Literacy (HEAL). Starting AY 2021, he will be a Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison working on his book project on refuge and forced migration. Mani has participated in every GSA conference since 2005 and has worked with research networks, seminars and organized panel series. He was Chair of the GSA-DAAD Book Prize Committee (2020) and is currently a member of GSA’s first committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.