Ananya Vajpeyi, assistant professor at the Centre for The Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India, will present the lecture, “Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and the Ethics of Collective Action,” at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at the Center for Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Room 101, on Quinnipiac University’s North Haven Campus, 370 Bassett Road. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Vajpeyi will discuss key moments in the life of B.R. Ambedkar, an Indian attorney, freedom fighter and social reformer, who is widely recognized as the father of India’s Constitution. She will elaborate on his ability to inspire community mobilization and reorient institutional practice in connection with intractable and insurmountable caste hierarchy and social discrimination issues.
The lecture, hosted by the department of legal studies, is part of the Human Rights, Development and Community Action Workshop being run in collaboration with the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights.
Vajpeyi, who works in intellectual history, political theory and critical philology, was most recently a visiting professor in south Asian and north African studies at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari. She has also taught at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, the University of Massachusetts Boston and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
In addition to teaching, Vajpeyi has had many international fellowships, including a Kluge Fellowship with the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress in 2013 and 2014. She is currently a Global Ethics Fellow with the Carnegie Council of Ethics in International Affairs.
Vajpeyi writes for The Hindu and guest-edits an issue of Seminar magazine each year. Her first book, “Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India,” was named book of the year in 2012 by the Guardian and the New Republic. It also received the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award for Nonfiction (2013) and the Crossword Award for Nonfiction (2013).
Vajpeyi earned her master’s in philosophy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a master’s from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Chicago.
For more information, call 203-582-8652.