Theory Today: A Lecture by Toral Jatin Gajarawala

Event details Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026 Time: 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM Location: Online Type: Lecture / Talk / Workshop Campus: University Park Campus Department: Levan Institute for the Humanities Audience: Students, Alumni, Faculty/Staff About this event Toral Jatin Gajarawala was trained in comparative literature at UC Berkeley, with a focus on Anglophone, Francophone and Hindi literatures. Her book Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (Fordham, 2013), sketches an anti-genealogy for Dalit literature, as against normative Indian realisms, modernisms, and regionalisms. Her new monograph, Strange Light: Modernism, Existentialism and the Aesthetics of the Postcolony (Cambridge UP, 2026), considers the afterlife of postcolonial existentialisms in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the work of artists, playwrights, and poets in conceptualizing another discourse of freedom. Official event details: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/theory-today-a-lecture-by-toral-jatin-gajarawala