Prof. S. Manikutty – Fellow (IIMA)

Prof. Manikutty specialized in Business Policy and Strategy in his doctorate and teaching, graduating from IIMA in 1987. Before joining IIMA, he served in the Indian Railways as a mechanical engineer for 21 years. His areas of interest include strategic management and competitive strategy, leadership, global competitiveness of industries, corporate governance and strategies for family businesses. His paper (coauthored with another person) won the award for the best paper on family businesses for 2003 awarded by the Family Firm Institute, Boston, U.S.A. His paper (coauthored) also won an award for the best empirical paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Small Business Institute, Clearwater Beach, Florida, February 11-15, 2004. His book on leadership based on literature, Essentials of Leadership: Explorations from Literature (Delhi: Bloomsbury), co-authored with Sampath P Singh, won the award for the best management book awarded by the Indian Society for Training and Development, in 2010, and its second edition has been published by Bloomsbury India. His subsequent books are: Business Ethics: Ethics as the Foundation of Business and Strategic Management: A South Asian Perspective jointly with Michael Hitt, Robert Hoskisson and Duane Ireland.

Prof. Manikutty was a visiting scholar at the Cornell University in the year 2000. Has written a number of cases, mostly dealing with issues in strategy, and published 13 papers in national and international journals. He was a visiting faculty at ESSEC, France, where he taught a full course for four years before retirement.

He was a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He also served in the Board of Governors, Sardar Patel Institute for Textiles, Coimbatore from 2016 to 2018. Currently he is on the Board of Governors of the IILM Institute for Higher Education, New Delhi (from April 2018).

At ELS 2020, Prof. Manikutty will speak on Literature: What It Can Offer for Education Community

Prof. Manikutty figured in the Marquis Who’s Who in the World for the year 2012.

He retired from Indian Institute of Management, Ahhedabad on December 31, 2010 and was on a contractual appointment as a full time faculty in the Business Policy Area, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad till March 31, 2012. Now he is a visiting faculty at IIM, Ahmedabad and an adjuct faculty at IIM, Bangalore, teaching courses on understanding leadership through literature.

He was given the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the National Academy of Indian Railways, Vadodara for the year 2018.

Jagdish Batra

Prof. Dr. Jagdish Batra, an academic, writer, and social activist is currently Professor of English at  O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonepat, India (ranked No. 1 Private University in India by QS World Rankings 2020, and declared ‘Institution of Eminence’ by the Govt. of India),  which he joined in 2012 as the Founding Head of English Language Centre. Prior to it, he worked as Principal, Hindu Institute of Competitions & Foreign Languages, Sonipat, and Head of PG Dept. of English in Hindu College, Sonipat.  He has more than 30 years of teaching experience and has guided 33 M.Phil. and 13 Ph.D. scholars. His areas of specialization include contemporary Indian English fiction, Culture Studies, and Literary Theory. He has presented papers as also presided at several international conferences in India, Europe, and South East Asia. He was recently presented the Research Excellence Award by the University. He is the Convener of six annual international literary conferences organized at Jindal Global. A former Rotary Group Study Exchange scholar to the USA, Dr. Batra has published eight books besides more than 50 research papers in leading journals. He is on the editorial boards of three literary journals including The Commonwealth Review and The Indo-American Review, and research panels of many universities. ORCID: 0000-0003-3261-4819.

At ELS 2020, Dr. Batra will deliver a talk on ’21st Century Indian English Fiction: Major Strands’.

Martin Puchner

Dr. Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prize-winning books and anthologies range from philosophy to the arts. His best-selling Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX online course have brought 4000 years of literature to students across the globe. His book The Written World featured on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, and has been translated into some twenty languages. He is a member of the European Academy and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and the Massachusetts Book Award.

His latest book, The Language of Thieves, interweaves family memoir with a reflection on Rotwelsch, the underground language of Central Europe, which he learned from his father and uncle.

At ELS 2020, Dr. Puchner will deliver a talk on Masterpieces of World Literature.

Mala Pandurang

Dr.Mala Pandurang is Professor/Principal at Dr. BMN College of Home Science  (Autonomous). She is a   postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) and has been nominated as ‘Ambassador Scientist to India’  for 2019-2022. She has also availed of short research- grant visits to the Universities of  Osnabruck, Augsburg,  Frankfurt, Potsdam, and Chemnitz through the sponsorship of the AvH.

Her research grants include Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin; recipient of the Charles Wallace In-UK Research grant;  1 Major research grant and 3 Minor research grants from the University Grants Commission (New Delhi); Inlaks Fellowship in Social Sciences from the Asiatic Society (Mumbai);   Associateship at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Shimla); and NET/JRF from the UGC.  Under her tenure,  Dr. BMN College has been selected as a UGC STRIDE Centre for Research Capacity Building ( 2020-2023). Her areas of research include postcolonial writing, diaspora theory, and gender studies.    

She has published 7 books and 43 research papers. In 2012 she received the SNDT Women’s University ‘Maharshi Karve Utkarshta Shikshak Puraskar’ (Best Teacher Award) from the Governor of Maharashtra.

At ELS 2020, Dr. Pandurang will talk on ‘On community, commuting and urban spaces – Literary representations of the Mumbai local trains‘.

Considered as among the heaviest passenger transit systems in the world,  the enforced lockdown due to the  COVID-19 pandemic has brought the load of the intricate suburban railway network of Mumbai down to a   minimum,  and yet reinforced the centrality of the trains to the lives of Mumbaikars.  My presentation will explore literary representations of the ‘local trains’  and use the same to link the centrality of the daily commute to the suburban culture of a city   ‘that never sleeps’’.