Ranjan Ghosh (academic)

{{Infobox academic

| name = Ranjan Ghosh

| image =

| caption =

| nationality = Indian

| occupation = {{flatlist|

Academic
teacher

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| awards =

| education =

| workplaces = University of North Bengal

| main_interests ={{flatlist|

comparative literature
comparative philosophy
philosophy of education
environmental humanities
critical and cultural theory
intellectual history

}}

| notable_works =

| website = {{Official website}}

}}

Ranjan Ghosh is an Indian academic and thinker who teaches at the Department of English, University of North Bengal, India. His wide-ranging scholarly work spans across the fields of comparative literature, comparative philosophy, philosophy of education, environmental humanities, critical and cultural theory, and Intellectual history. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

Career

Ghosh teaches at the Department of English, University of North Bengal. Prior to that he taught at Darjeeling Government College, West Bengal.{{cite journal|last1=Clark|first1=Timothy|title=Editorial|journal=Oxford Literary Review|volume=28|issue=1|year=2006|pages=4|issn=0305-1498|doi=10.3366/olr.2006.001}} He was a University Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland during 2005–06, and a Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany in 2006.[https://www.nbu.ac.in/doc/dept/english/Eng_RG.pdf University of North Bengal] He was elected an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in November 2006.{{cite news |title=Alexander's gift|newspaper=Telegraph India|date=8 February 2007|url=https://www.telegraphindia.com/education/alexander-s-gift/cid/1329369|access-date=13 July 2021|archive-date=13 July 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210713184352/https://www.telegraphindia.com/education/alexander-s-gift/cid/1329369|url-status=live}}

He delivered a distinguished lecture series on Plastic hosted by Beijing Language and Culture University, Shenzhen University and Lanzhou University (2021), and a mini seminar series, Plastic Turn, at the Critical Theory Institute, University of California (2018). He was a visiting professor at the Department of English and Culture, University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli, Italy (2019); visiting professor at the Department of English, Ashoka University (2019); visiting faculty member of the South Asia Program at Cornell University; visiting professor at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Germany and guest professor at the Siebold Institute of Advanced Studies (2017).

Works

His wide-ranging scholarly work engages with many fields of comparative literature, comparative philosophy, philosophy of education, environmental humanities, critical and cultural theory and intellectual history. His significant work in these areas include: the critically acclaimed Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) that he co-authored with American literary critic J. Hillis Miller, issued by Duke University Press. The book has been cited in numerous essays, journal forums, and reviews.{{cite journal |last=Beebee|first=Thomas O.|title=Review: Thinking Literature across Continents by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller|journal=Comparative Literature Studies|publisher=The Pennsylvania State University Press|volume=55|issue=4|year=2018|issn=0010-4132|doi=10.5325/complitstudies.55.4.0891|page=891}}{{cite journal|last1=Radhakrishnan|first1=R.|last2=Srinivasan|first2=Ragini Tharoor|title=Thinking Thinking Literature Across Continents Across Generations|journal=Comparative Literature Studies|publisher=The Pennsylvania State University Press|volume=55|issue=4|year=2018|issn=0010-4132|doi=10.5325/complitstudies.55.4.0921|pages=921–939|hdl=10150/631787|s2cid=149885144 |hdl-access=free}}{{cite journal |last=Beebee|first=Thomas O.|title=Thinking Literature across Continents by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller|journal=Comparative Literature Studies|publisher=The Pennsylvania State University Press|volume=55|issue=4|year=2018|issn=0010-4132|doi=10.5325/complitstudies.55.4.0891|page=891}} In particular two special numbers on the book were published by CounterText.[https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/count/3/3 CounterText, Vol. 3, Issue 3, December, 2017][https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/count/4/1 CounterText, Vol. 4, Issue 4, April, 2018] Subsequently Penn State University's Interdisciplinary Literary Studies also issued a special number of their work,[https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38659 Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Vol. 20, Issue 2, 2018] as did Symploke (University of Nebraska Press),[https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/37931 Symploke, Vol. 25, Numbers 1-2, 2017] College Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press),[https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/39252 College Literature, Vol. 45, Issue 4, Fall 2018] and Literary Imagination (Oxford University Press).[https://academic.oup.com/litimag/issue/20/3 Literary Imagination, Volume 20, Issue 3, November 2018]

His works have been published in journals including Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, SubStance, Oxford Literary Review, The Comparatist, Comparative Education Review, Symploke, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, The Minnesota Review, History and Theory, Modern Language Notes, College Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Parallax, University of Toronto Quarterly, Angelaki and others.{{cite book|chapter=Contributors|year=2017|pages=221–222|doi=10.7591/9780801469206-013|title=Presence |isbn=9780801469206 }}

Ghosh's thinking on historiography and historical theory comes through in his book A Lover's Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading (2012).{{cite journal |last=Burton|first=Antoinette |title=Review: Ranjan Ghosh, A Lover's Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading|journal=South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies|publisher=Informa UK Limited|volume=37|issue=3|year=2014|doi=10.1080/00856401.2014.932480|pages=541–542|s2cid=146558837 }} His book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016) examines the function of literature and literariness through the transnational and transcultural basis of critical, scholarly, literary, and artistic voices.{{cite journal|last=Miller|first=J. Hillis|title=Response to College Literature's Forum on Thinking Literature Across Continents|journal=College Literature|volume=45|issue=4|year=2018|pages=861–868|issn=1542-4286|doi=10.1353/lit.2018.0056|s2cid=149590341 }}

Ghosh's work on education resulted in the exploration of Rabindranath Tagore's ideas of education within the framework of transcultural philosophy of education. His book Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore: A Transcultural Philosophy of Education (2017) offers "a radical rethinking of Indian thinker Rabindranath Tagore, exploring how his philosophy of education relates to the ideas of Western theorists such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Martin Buber, Derrida, Deleuze, and others". Ghosh has also introduced new conceptual terms of readings in the critical humanities like 'trans(in)fusion approach' (his recent book is called Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking from New York, 2020), 'trans-habit' in literary studies (his book Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet from New York, 2017), and very recently Plastic literature, Plastic Turn and others.[https://www.humanities.uci.edu/SOH//calendar/event_details.php?eid=6308&fn=2 Ranjan Ghosh—The Plastic Turn]

Ghosh is currently the co-editor with Emelia Quinn of the English Association's journal Yearbook on Critical and Cultural Theory published by Oxford University Press.[https://academic.oup.com/ywcct The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory]

=Representative works=

Lover's Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading (Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2012)
Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century ed. (Ithaca, New York, London: Cornell University Press, 2013, with Ethan Kleinberg)
Thinking Literature Across Continents (with J. Hillis Miller) (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2016)
Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore: A Transcultural Philosophy of Education (London: Palgrave, 2017)
Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet: From Philip Sidney to T. S. Eliot (New York: Routledge, 2017)
Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)
Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking (New York: Routledge, 2019)
The Plastic Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022)
Plastic Controversy. Critical Inquiry, In the Moment. February, 2021.
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