B. Venkat Mani

Member of the steering committee

B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German, and Director of the Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his B.A. (Honors) and M.A. in German Studies from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University. His research and teaching focus on 19th to 21st Century German literature and culture, migrants and refugees in the German and European context, book and digital cultural histories, world literature, and theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism. Fellowships and grants include Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship (for research on Recoding World Literature), Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Grant on his project “Bibliomigrancy”, most recently a visiting fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literaturund Kulturforschung Berlin with the Research Group on Weltliteratur, and a Title VI National Resource Center Grant for Center for South Asia from the US Department of Education. He is the author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007, which received Honorable Mention by the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham University Press, 2017, winner of the 2018 DAAD Best Book Prize of the German Studies Association in Germanistik and Cultural Studies). He is the editor of several co-edited volumes and associate editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature (forthcoming). He is working on a new book on refugees and world literature.