Faculty Forum

New performances, projects, research and scholarship from RISD faculty in conjunction with the Biennial Faculty Exhibition on selected dates at the Museum.
Art and Translation in David Edgar's Pentecost
British playwright David Edgar's recent award-winning play Pentecost unfolds as an art historical whodunit meets riveting hostage drama set in an "unknown Southeast European country" in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. This presentation by Avishek Ganguly, Assistant Provessor, Literary Arts and Studies, discusses how this ambitious, multilingual text stages a fascinating relationship between the act of translation and the emergence of the visual in a politically charged situation.
Avishek Ganguly is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies at Rhode Island School of Design. He received his MA, M.Phil and Ph.D in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York. He also has a BA (Honours) in English from Presidency College, Calcutta and a MA in English and Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Ganguly's research and teaching interests are focused on the various intersections between contemporary drama, literature, and performance and questions of translation and multilingualism, the formation of collectivities, and everyday life and urban space. He has published on contemporary urban musical cultures in India, leftist periodical publications in the nineteen sixties, and most recently, on the relationship between theatre and multilingualism. Works in progress include an essay, and a book project that looks at how multilingualism and translation gets figured across a range of contemporary dramatic and performance texts.
For additional program dates and more information on the RISD Faculty Biennial, click here.