Prof. Pramod K Nayar of the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) has been awarded the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies. This prestigious Chair has an initial tenure of four years. The Chair will work with other nationally and internationally located UNESCO Chairs in furthering the United Nations’ agenda, especially its SDGs. The Chair is mandated to develop teaching courses & programs, undertake outreach work, and execute research leading to outstanding publications. The Chair has a 15-member global team, as approved by UNESCO, across political science & international relations, environmental humanities, law, geography, literary-cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines.
Prof. Pramod K Nayar
Professor BJ Rao, Vice Chancellor said: “I am delighted at the award of the prestigious UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies to Professor Pramod K Nayar, to be hosted in English, UoH. It is recognition of his considerable body of work and his global standing. The Chair will greatly facilitate our university’s internationalization under the Institution of Eminence (IoE) project. I wish the Chair and Chair holder, Pramod, all success”.
Nayar’s published work in the field, which secured him the Visitor’s Award for Best Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences from the Hon’ble President of India in 2018, includes Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (Routledge 2012), Human Rights and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic (Lexington 2017), Ecoprecarity (Routledge New York 2019), The Human Rights Graphic Novel (Routledge 2021) and Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity (forthcoming from Routledge New York), besides numerous essays on precarious lives. He is ranked 120th in the world in literary studies, according to a 2021 Stanford University study, and the only academic in an Indian University in the global 200 in the discipline.
Pramod Nayar is an alumnus of English, UoH, from the MA through his Ph.D. He has been associated with UoH as faculty from 2001.
This is the second UNESCO Chair in the University. The first UNESCO Chair on Community Media is occupied by Prof. Vinod Pavarala in the Department of Communication.