Prof. Pramod K Nayar, Head, Department of English at the School of Humanities at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) has won the Visitor’s Award for the Best Research in the category of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences for the year 2018.
The award was presented to him at a glittering ceremony by the Hon’ble President of India, Shri Ram Nath Kovind on 2nd May 2018 during a meeting of vice chancellors of central universities at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. This is the first time that a faculty from the UoH has won this prestigious research award since its inception in the year 2015. The award carries a citation and prize money of Rs: One Lakh. Prof. Nayar is being honoured for “his research and publications particularly covering the important areas of poetry for the underprivileged, memoirs and fiction, the Bhopal gas tragedy and other episodes.”
Every year the Visitor’s Awards are presented for outstanding research work carried out by scientists and faculty associated with Central Universities in the Country. For selecting the winners, online applications were invited from all Central Universities for each category. A Selection Committee headed by Shri Sanjay Kothari, Secretary to the President and comprising eminent persons and academicians, assisted by a Sub Committee, chose the winners of the Awards.
Prof. Appa Rao Podile, Vice-Chancellor of UoH was elated on this achievement and said, “I congratulate Professor Pramod Nayar for this recognition bestowed on him by the jury. We are proud of his outstanding contributions. Professor Pramod is not only a faculty (and current HoD) but is our alumnus as well. This recognition to Professor Pramod vindicates our research strength in the areas of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.” “Let us hope for more such honours in future for the University, faculty, students, alumni and staff”, he added.
DESCRIPTION OF RESEARCH WHICH WON THE AWARD
Over the last 6-10 years Prof. Pramod’s research has been located within the field of “Human Rights and Literary-Cultural studies”, with consistent, varied publications in the reputed journals, indexed by the Modern Language Association, Arts and Humanities Citation Index and other top indices for the Humanities, and four books from global publishers.
His work on precarity and precarious lives has sought to understand representations of precarious lives, from India and global contexts, across literary and cultural texts, including memoirs, films, fiction, poetry, graphic novels, eyewitness accounts and other documents. His research may therefore be described as explorations of the cultural texts around Human Rights, whether these involve persons subject to torture, violence, war or are the victims of industrial disasters like Bhopal, the caste system and/or racism. It has studied Dalit writing, torture films, the Bhopal tragedy, literary fiction around Human Rights, among other genres and media. It has also examined the role of biological sciences such as genetics and their influence on constructions of precarious lives, belonging, kinship and other conditions.
The principle challenge in this overarching project has been to document multiple modes – narrative and aesthetic – of representing trauma, social injustice, victimhood, extreme violence and Human Rights. It has involved tracking and tracing, broadly speaking, the ‘language of Human Rights’.
His books in this area of “Human Rights and Literary-Cultural Studies” include:
(i) Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (Routledge 2012)
(ii) The Extreme in Contemporary Culture: States of Vulnerability (Rowman and Littlefield 2017)
(iii) Human Rights and Literature: Writing Rights (Palgrave Macmillan 2016)
(iv) Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny (Lexington – Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)
These books have endorsements by established and distinguished scholars in the field, and have become primary reading in courses and syllabi in various universities.
Besides the above books, much of the research output has appeared in the form of essays in internationally published. His work has appeared in (in the last 6 years alone):
Image and Text, a/b: Auto/biography Studies [twice], Biography, Orbis Litterarum, Journal of Postcolonial Writing [twice], Celebrity Studies, South Asian Studies [twice], ANQ, Explicator[twice], Rendezvous, Asiatic, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, South Asian Diaspora.
Before this, his work has also appeared in the following journals from outside India:
Prose Studies, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Text, Ariel, Kunapipi, Westerly, 1650-1850, Studies in Travel Writing, Nordic Journal of English Studies, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Brno Studies in English, The Grove, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Journal of Contemporary Thought, Changing English, Mediterranean Journal of the Humanities, Nebula [twice].
Among the academia.edu profiles, Prof. Pramod figures in the top 0.1 % of researchers in the field of literary-cultural studies, with nearly 3000 followers from all over the world.
Prof. Pramod Nayar can be contacted on email: pramodknayar@gmail.com
UoH Herald congratulates Prof . Pramod Nayar on this achievement.