Ranjana Khanna, associate professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University, will discuss the changing use of the word "asylum" and its importance in feminist politics at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 23, in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester's River Campus.
Khanna's work concentrates on Anglo and Francophone postcolonial theory and literature, psychoanalysis, film, and feminist theory. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003), and has recently completed a manuscript titled Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present. Her talk is free and open to the pubic.
The lecture will focus on her latest project about the concept and practice of asylum. Asylum can designate places of refuge, of worship, homes for the insane with specific architectural design, and holding facilities for asylum seekers. Specifically, Khanna will look at the notion of disposability and the various forms of dehumanization associated with asylums.
Khanna received her doctoral degree in women's studies at the University of York in Great Britain, and was a 1994 Rockefeller Fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Rochester.
The lecture is presented by the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Susan B. Anthony Institute, and is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Department of English, the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, the Office of College Advancement, and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies.
A reception will follow the lecture. For more details, contact (585) 275-8318.