Vidyan Ravinthiran
· Associate Professor of EnglishHarvard University · English
Active 2010–2026
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About
Vidyan Ravinthiran is a Harvard College Professor and the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at the Department of English. His research interests include the literature, history, and culture of New World slavery; African-American literature and visual art; Anglophone Caribbean literature; and Native American and Latino literature. His academic background includes a B.A. from Vassar College obtained in 1991 and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley completed in 2002. Ravinthiran's work focuses on exploring the intersections of race, history, and culture through literary and visual arts, contributing to a deeper understanding of marginalized histories and narratives within American and global contexts.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Literature
- Art
- Philosophy
- Epistemology
- Law
- Aesthetics
- Sociology
- Visual arts
- Pedagogy
Selected publications
Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose
2022-12-22 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This study analyses post-Romantic prose whose authors—in terms of race, gender, class, nationality, and more—occupy a range of subject positions, for, in that prose, the dialectical interplay of spontaneity with form. Modern literary prose has no rhetorical repertoire, unlike poetry no structures (beyond those of grammar) one could tabulate. As a result, it becomes a zone of experimentation as to what spontaneous creativity might be like, as well as a means to investigate the concept of…
Keats, Distance, and Feeling-States
ELH · 2022 · 1 citations
1st authorCorrespondingThis essay extrapolates from John Jones on Keats's "feeling-states" a counterhistoricist aesthetics also germane to minoritized and postcolonial writers, and to the global citizen haplessly, today, immersed in streams of news-data. Revisiting Jerome McGann's famous attack on "To Autumn" and its "romantic ideology" (theparadigmatic instance of historicism confronting a resistant text), I consider "Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed," Isabella; Or, the Pot of Basil, and the poetry of Claudi…
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-08-06 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingProse was both a fascination and a bugbear for Bishop. It fascinated her as a concept aligned with a wished-for sane worldliness, powers of empathy rather than self-expression, and an outward gaze inclusive of modern materials, that could outpace the narcissism encoded (it might seem) within the structures of old-style metrical verse. (She’d have liked to write more fiction, but worried she wasn’t good enough at entering other people’s minds.) Considering – finding exemplarily stylish sentences…
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-03-10
book1st authorCorrespondingIdentifying ourselves, others, writers, with their opinions—and taking the form of the opinion as the epitome of political engagement—we assert a picture of the self that ought to be scrutinized. Mass print generated, along with the railways, telegraph, information-relays national and global, as well as the development of specialized forms of technological, scientific, economic, and medical knowledge, a sea of discourse belying any vision of a cogent public sphere: disinformation is not a purely…
Sri Lankan anglophone poetry and modernist painting
Interventions · 2024
1st authorCorrespondingThe Cubist painter George Keyt became, in the three books of verse he wrote while unable to paint, Sri Lanka's first Anglophone Modernist poet. His enquiry into the limits of representation, cognized through an alignment of literary with visual art, became central to Sri Lankan lyric. Although poems in this line take up the argument that Western art is an aesthetic branch of colonialism, their indebtedness to Modernist painting (and Modernist poetry) makes for self-questioning, intertextual and…
Awards & honors
- Northern Writers Award
- Poetry Book Society Recommendation
- shortlisted for the Forward Prize
- winner of the University English Prize
- Warren-Brooks Award for Literary Criticism
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