ABSTRACT
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942) is a Bengali cultural and literary critic. Born in Calcutta, India, to a middle-class family during the waning years of British colonial rule, she attended Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, graduating in 1959 with a degree in English literature. She came to the United States in 1962 and attended graduate school at Cornell University, where she received her Ph.D. in comparative literature under the supervision of Paul de Man, who introduced her to the work of Jacques Derrida. Her 1977 English translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) made Derrida’s work available to a wider audience. She gained substantial recognition from her outstanding introduction to that work, quickly becoming recognized among English-speaking academics as an authority on Derrida’s thought. Spivak is currently Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.
