B. Venkat Mani
Credentials: German
Position title: Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities
Email: bvmani@wisc.edu
Address:
Office Number: 858 Van Hise Hall
Language: German, Turkish, Hindi, Urdu
Research/Language Interests: 19th to 21st Century German literature and culture; World literature; Translation; the Novel; Migrants and Refugees in German, European, and global contexts; Literature and Migration; Print- and digital cultural histories; Theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism.
About: B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German and World Literatures, former director of Center for South Asia, and currently the Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity (REI) Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He is the author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham UP, 2017; winner of German Studies Association’s DAAD Prize and Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies 2018). Mani has edited or co-edited several volumes including German Quarterly’s Forum “World Literature: Against Isolationist Readings” (2021), and A Companion to World Literature (Wiley Blackwell 2020). He’s published widely in many academic journals in the fields of World Literature, German Studies, Comparative Literature, South Asian Literatures, Migration and Refugee Studies, and Book- and Library Histories. His public humanities essays can be read in in Inside Higher Ed, Telos, The Wire (Hindi), The Hindustan Times, and The Indian Express. He serves on the editorial board of Das Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, and the advisory board of Cornell University Press’s series Signale Mani is currently working on a monograph on refugees and the global novel.
Mani’s first passion is teaching, for which he has won several student-nominated teaching awards. He has mentored undergraduate and graduate students from several fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He has regularly offered seminars at Harvard’s Institute for World Literature.
Mani has received research fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council; the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Grant; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Experienced Researcher Fellowship; the US Department of Education’s Title VI Grant for Center for South Asia; and a DAAD grant for UW’s Center for German and European Studies. In 2018, he was a residential fellow at ZfL Berlin and in 2022 a Marbach, Weimar, Wolfenbüttel (MWW) Research Fellow at DLA Marbach. Mani has served on numerous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees on campus and nationally. He was one of the Diversity Liaison Fellows for the Office of UW Diversity and the Vice Provost for Faculty and Staff (2019-21), and a friend-mentor for the Mercile J. Lee Scholarship Program (2021-22). He serves on the Faculty Committee of the L&S Honors Program.
Affiliated Departments: Department of English; Center for South Asia; Center for German and European Studies; Center for the History of Print and Digital Cultures
Education:
• Stanford University, Ph.D. German Studies (2001)
• Stanford University, M.A. German Studies (1996)
• Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, M.A. German Studies (1995)
• Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, B.A. (Honors) German Studies (1993)