Apurva Prasad, "Litigating in Court: Women Authors Articulating Authorial Rights and Literary Ownership in India Across Hindi, Punjabi, and English Publics (1980s–2020s)"
 
For this Graduate Student Colloquium with GSWS, I will provide a critical overview of my proposed PhD dissertation project, outlining the key research stakes, dissertation structure, research intervention, and relevant archives. This work will study why authors go to court and how they defend their literature there, arguing that the legal apparatus is a crucial site for authors to protect their literary rights and reputation in postcolonial India (1980-2020). It centers the figure of the woman author, grappling with why she litigates and how gender complicates her authorial rights, making the ownership of the work she has authored more tenuous. I situate this project at the intersection of legal and literary studies to articulate a historically grounded intervention into how authors deploy the legal apparatus to protect their work, analyzing how “women’s authorship” is articulated and contested in court. This scholarship will examine how the court, specifically through the Indian Copyright Act of 1957, became a venue for authors to assert their authorial rights over their work in the 1980s. It is also attentive to the crucial role of the public sphere in defining authorship and authorial rights, focusing on the intersecting Hindi, Punjabi, and English Public spheres. Finally, it argues that authorship is constituted in relation to each author’s reading public and reputation. In this vein, this project also examines how legalistic articulations of literary ownership, such as adhikār (rights), mukadamā (litigation), and bauddhik sampadān(intellectual property), are deployed by authors across the Hindi, English, and Punjabi public spheres to articulate the ownership of their literature.
 

Austin Svedjan,"Literary Hygienics: Sex Ed and the English Classroom"

This talk proposes that we best see the development of modern sexuality in the twentieth century and its deployment when we see it through what it refers to as “literary hygienics”—the historical relationship between literary education and sexual and racial hygiene. Intervening upon scholarship in queer theory since Foucault which has retained a fidelity to thinking about aesthetic pleasure as a sexual outside to the disciplinary mechanics of biopower represented through sciences like sexology, I show how a version of aesthetic thinking about pleasure uncannily similar to those theorists’ was mobilized by social hygienists through the institutionalization of sexual education in the English classrooms of United States public high schools in the first decades of the twentieth century. While comprehensive, pleasure-based sex education is routinely suggested in the present as a liberatory solution to experiences of “bad” sex associated with ignorance, tracing the historical project of sexual education in the first decades of the twentieth century reveals how sex education was not a progressive reform movement towards a liberated utopia of sexual pleasure but one of the means by which the category of bad sex was defined in relation to the racial and sexual category of the “unhygienic.”

Please RSVP for either in-person or virtual attendance. 

Questions? Please contact Nat rivkin @nrivkin@sas.upenn.edu