Dr. Vinay Lal

Reading Gandhi: Caveats, Foundations, Hermeneutics

Monday, October 27, 2014
McElhinney Building Room 106

Vinay Lal was born in India in 1961. He grew up in Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta, and Washington, D.C., and earned his B.A. and M.A., both in 1982, from the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University. He then studied cinema in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship before commencing his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a Ph.D. with Distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations in 1992. He was William Kenan Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University in 1992-93. Vinay Lal has been teaching History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1993. Vinay writes widely on Indian history, the popular and public culture of India (especially cinema), the Indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary American politics, and the politics of knowledge systems.